Before I even get started, I know that many of you may have already tuned out. Cryptocurrency? You mean the thing that gave birth to all those stupid NFTs of Bored Apes, and innumerable "rug pulls" where the founder of a coin disappeared with millions? The same thing
I find it fascinating whenever Anthropic in particular comes out with either a new AI model or a note about what it has learned about an existing model, because the responses almost always fall into one of two camps: the first is the "Oh my god, we're
I'm a writer, as some (hopefully most) of you know. I've been a writer and journalist for more than 40 years now. It's one of the few things I really know how to do, and it's about the only way I have
Meta has been found guilty in two separate but related cases involving the alleged harms of its social platforms in the past couple of weeks. In one, a jury found that Facebook and Instagram harmed a young user with features that were addictive and either caused or exacerbated her mental
There are lots of potential nightmares when it comes to artificial intelligence. In a recent Torment Nexus I wrote about how the U.S. government seems hell-bent on using AI to engage in mass surveillance of American citizens (and probably lots of other people as well) and also to pilot
You may have seen the recent headlines about how a company called Niantic Spatial is using a database of real-world locations that was originally compiled by players of the mobile game Pokemon Go — a game that launched about a decade ago and quickly became an obsession for tens of millions
In 2016, staff at both the U.S. and Canadian embassies in Cuba started reporting a host of unusual physical symptoms: severe headaches, nausea, muscle aches, nose bleeds, etc. Adults and children were both affected to varying degrees. Many of those who reported these symptoms said they heard high-pitched noises,
I came across a maxim many years ago in a blog post written by Chris Dixon, a startup guy who is now a partner with Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley VC outfit. In 2010 Dixon wrote: "The next big thing will start out looking like a toy," a
The term "prediction market" sounds so scientific, doesn't it? Like "derivatives," the financial instrument they resemble. On platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi, people place a bet on the likelihood of certain outcomes, whether political or sporting or anything else (want to bet on whether
It's the kind of headline that might seem either like a hypothetical philosophical concern, or a deeply worrying revelation, depending on how you feel about AI: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently said the company is "no longer sure whether Claude is conscious." On the one hand,
If you watched the Super Bowl last weekend and are either located in the United States or have access to the American commercials, you might have seen a heartwarming ad for a new feature of Amazon's Ring doorbell cameras, called Search Party. The ad shows people putting up
As usual, the past week or so has been filled with the usual insanity on the part of Homeland Security, who keep finding new ways to surveill and harass and in some cases execute American citizens — something I've been following and writing about here from time to time,