AI: tech, society, politics

Public AI providers can do both. If nudging Facebook users towards more positive or negative content can change their emotions, imagine the effect of public AI providers turning up the temperature on their core models. That single parameter could control how polite or rude we are to each other in billions of emails and text messages. Other... See more

If companies put public chatbots on top of their corporate databases, it won’t be for radical transparency, or because they haven’t had the technology to “crunch digital data” without it. Instead, they’ll do it because that chatbot will be told that it should use the right optimistic adjectives, that it should keep to the company line about the... See more

But AI is surely becoming a new invisible hand pulling the levers in our minds. It is some inscrutable new force that’s writing the first draft of history. It’s interpreting our data; it’s creating our websites; it might soon summarize our emails and brainstorm our ideas and suggest our dinners and mediate our relationships. The shift isn’t from... See more

Competition in the cloud computing market is impeded through a familiar playbook, he writes: Bundling services, opaque pricing schemes, and high switching costs that keep customers locked in.

Company bosses will blanch at the idea of radical financial transparency. After all, it amounts to handing over some control of how corporate facts are presented. Real-time reporting would also reduce the value of financial window-dressing — arranging cash flows to make the quarterly snapshot more attractive — to zero. Still, some nerves could be... See more

ChatGPT has also become a broadly accessible global tool, with especially rapid growth in low- and middle-income countries. By May 2025, ChatGPT adoption growth rates in the lowest income countries were over 4x those in the highest income countries.

Musk isn’t afraid to use his technologies to advance his politics. We’ve seen how his tweaks to X have made it more Nazi-friendly, and how his chatbot will start talking about “white genocide.” We’ve seen Musk enable a war effort, and we’ve seen him deny that aid when it suited him to do so. This has all happened while Starlink is in its relative... See more

But all of that is peanuts, potentially, compared to Trump’s pursuit of a “Golden Dome” over America, which would allegedly protect it from ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles all at once. Trump picked the top general from the Space Force to lead it and promised that such a defense would include “space-based sensors and interceptors.” That... See more

Finally, Sam Altman of OpenAI says that having thoroughly reviewed the mental health risks of ChatGPT, it’s now going to let adults do what they want, and also start offering erotica for verified adults. From ‘AGI will save humanity’ to ‘erotica for verified adults’. That didn’t take long.