The Curse of the Creator Economy
Journalist Taylor Lorenz isn’t the first to declare legacy media a dead industry walking. But few voice it with the conviction that she does—and an even more vigorous claim that …
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The Las Vegas Sphere Makes Virtual Reality a Full-Body Experience
The best virtual reality experience I’ve had this year was not with the $500 Quest 3 or the $3,500 Apple VisionPro, and it didn’t even require a headset. Sure, it …
Hey Zuck, Get Those Robots out of My Social Feed
When I bring up these concerns to Meta’s VP of generative AI, Ahmad Al-Dahle, post-keynote, he accuses me of having “a dystopian point of view.” Adding AI bots to the …
Smarter AI Assistants Could Make It Harder to Stay Human
Researchers and futurists have been talking for decades about the day when intelligent software agents will act as personal assistants, tutors, and advisers. Apple produced its famous Knowledge Navigator video …
If Elon Musk Had Been a Happy Child, Would He Still Be Launching Rockets?
I meet with Walter Isaacson in a small conference room in the offices of book publisher Simon & Schuster. The walls are festooned with framed covers, including of course Isaacson’s …
Trump Squeezed America’s Geek Squad. Biden Built It Back Stronger
Mina Hsiang returned to the United States Digital Service, the US government’s rapid digital fix-it squad, on January 26, 2021, when the streets of Washington, DC, had hardly been cleared …
AI Can’t Read Books. It’s Reviewing Them Anyway
Now that we’ve all had experience with large language models, their limitations are all too visible. Yes, they can write. But their prose doesn’t explode in the mind like the …
25 Years Ago Steve Jobs Launched the First iMac—and the Strategy That Saved Apple
Steve Jobs didn’t want the photographer. It was May 1998, and he was about to launch the iMac, the computer that would strap Apple in for a wild ride to …
Geoffrey Hinton, Godfather of AI, Has a Hopeful Plan for Keeping Future AI Friendly
That sounded to me like he was anthropomorphizing those artificial systems, something scientists constantly tell laypeople and journalists not to do. “Scientists do go out of their way not to …
Hands On With Google Search’s Answer to ChatGPT
Last weekend, I turned to Google Search for help figuring out how many stamps I needed to put on an 8-ounce piece of mail. (Naturally, I was sending a copy …