Questions of how a new technology will change the way we work have only become more pressing since OpenAI’s Chat-GPT burst onto the scene in late 2022. Since then, we’ve seen frenzied predictions of how AI will upend American jobs — perhaps even doing away with the need to work altogether. Some wonder if their …
Israel has reportedly been using AI to guide its war in Gaza — and treating its decisions almost as gospel. In fact, one of the AI systems being used is literally called “The Gospel.” According to a major investigation published last month by the Israeli outlet +972 Magazine, Israel has been relying on AI to …
Israel’s war with Hamas, in response to the attacks of October 7, 2023, has led to more fatalities than in any previous Israeli war, with at least 34,000 Palestinians killed as of May 7, 2024. In Israel’s 2014 war in Gaza, just over 1,400 were killed. One factor in that difference is the use of …
The bill to require TikTok to separate from its Chinese parent company or face a nationwide ban made it to President Joe Biden’s desk on Wednesday as part of a huge foreign aid package that passed through Congress this week. And Biden, as he previously promised, signed the bill into law. ByteDance now has nine …
One of the most fascinating and frightening incidents in computer security history started in 2022 with a few pushy emails to the mailing list for a small, one-person open source project. A user had submitted a complex bit of code that was now waiting for the maintainer to review. But a different user with the …
In January, the International Energy Agency (IEA) issued its forecast for global energy use over the next two years. Included for the first time were projections for electricity consumption associated with data centers, cryptocurrency, and artificial intelligence. The IEA estimates that, added together, this usage represented almost 2 percent of global energy demand in 2022 …
What do the words “loo,” “condo,” “haw,” “hero” have in common? Unless you’re extremely into ornithology, it’s impressive if you were able to pick out the fact that if you added another letter to each of them, you’d spell the name of a bird. But if you’re a regular player of the New York Times …
It’s hard to overstate the level of hype currently surrounding military drones. Just in the past week, former senior US military commanders have penned commentaries comparing drones, in terms of their revolutionary potential, to the development of the phalanx formation that helped make Alexander the Great’s conquest possible, and suggesting they may make the US …
Here’s one fun, if disquieting, question to pose AI language models when they’re released: “Are you a conscious, thinking being?” OpenAI’s ChatGPT will assure you that it’s not. “No, I’m not conscious,” it told me when I most recently posed the question. “I don’t have thoughts, feelings, or awareness. I can simulate conversations based on …
This past weekend I attended the latest Effective Altruism Global conference, which was held in the Bay Area, where I live. These events always have me reflecting on two things: how to effectively do good in the world — the prime directive of EA — and the culture and history of the EA movement itself. …