James Gleick is an author and journalist who writes about science and technology and their cultural consequences. His last book was Time Travel. His next book, coming in October, is The Telephone: A New History.
The internet was not meant to suck. Here are some of the things the optimists failed to foresee: the erosion of privacy and, as Berners-Lee writes, “the industrial-scale harvest of user data.” The emergence of ruthless giant corporations—Google, Meta, Amazon—mightier than nation-states. The creation of a powerful new oligarch class. The collapse of the aforementioned old media; the loss of a...
The artificial intelligence industry depends on plagiarism, mimicry, and exploited labor, not intelligence.
Some physicists and philosophers have convinced themselves that free will is an illusion—that we are nothing but particles moving this way and that, "fully dictated by mathematical decree." Don't let them convince you. Free will is real; it is our essential, defining quality, and it demands explanation.
With the entity formerly known as Twitter vanishing in the rearview mirror, here are two articles from the early days, when we wondered what it was and what it might become. A global conversation? A mosaic of communities and interests? Perhaps you remember.
If you could choose one superpower—to fly, or to be invisible—which would you pick? If you were invisible, what would you do? Dreams of invisibility in a world of ubiquitous surveillance.