A Chronicle from the Information Frontier A marvellous journey around our technology-drenched world … The work of a master.” The Independent Here’s some of what just happened: Millions of ordinary, sensible people came into possession of computers. These machines had wondrous powers, yet made unexpected demands on their owners. Telephones broke free of the chains that had shackled them to...
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.
The chatbots have read practically everything, and they still can’t be trusted. ichard Powers’s new novel, Playground, features an artificial intelligence resembling the new generation of “large language models,” like ChatGPT and Gemini. At one point a character grumbles: “You see? They think we’re too simple to know how to google things. They think we need an artificial nanny app to...
What if the future is as real as the past? Physicists have been suggesting as much since Einstein. It’s all just the space-time continuum. “So in the future, the sister of the past,” thinks young Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, “I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be.” Twisty! What if you received knowledge of your own tragic future—as a gift, or perhaps...
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.