Last March — which feels like a hundred years ago now — I wrote a post titled "Be careful what you post on social media: They are listening," in which I looked at how the Immigration and Customs Enforcement branch of Homeland Security had become a kind of secret police
I got an unusual email the other day from someone representing the Oxford Union, a fairly prestigious student-run debating society based (not surprisingly) at the University of Oxford in England. The Union was founded by students in 1823 and, despite the name, is separate and distinct from the actual student
Australia recently became the first country in the world to ban kids under 16 from using social media — the result of a law that was passed last year but didn't take effect until this month — but it is unlikely to be the last. Malaysia recently announced that it
If you spend much time wandering around what we used to call the social web — and by that I mean primarily the large social apps and platforms like Facebook and Instagram and X and Snapchat and even TikTok — you might find yourself sympathizing with the great Yogi Berra, who once
Before we get started, let's agree that Elon Musk's promises about full self-driving on the Tesla have been figments of his ketamine-addled imagination, if not an outright fraud. Musk first promised FSD in 2016, almost a full decade ago, and it is barely any closer now.
My last Torment Nexus piece was about how weak the FTC's antitrust case against Meta was, weak enough that it was thrown out by a federal court judge. But don't take that argument as evidence that I am a Meta fan — far from it. It may
The Federal Trade Commission's antitrust case against Meta was dismissed in its entirety on February 18th by Judge James Boasberg of the District Court for the District of Columbia. Just to recap for those who haven't been following every bump and hurdle of this five-year case,
In a recent edition of The Torment Nexus, I wrote about Wikipedia, which I argued was one of the best things the internet ever created (or that we all created with the help of the internet). In my opinion, there is another thing that ranks right up there with Wikipedia
I've used this analogy before in other contexts, but the way we respond to or think about artificial intelligence reminds me of the old parable – first recorded in a Buddhist text from about 500 BCE – about the blind men who encountered an elephant for the first time. The
I know what many of you are thinking as you read the headline on this post: The best thing ever? But what about Twitch Plays Pokemon, in which millions of people simultaneously played the game by posting commands in a chat room? Or the Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group, the website
It's a truism – at least in my experience – that the coverage of new product launches often seems to focus on the minutiae of a product. With Apple's new phones, for example, it's about how rounded the corners are or how big the bezel is,
Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a piece for The Torment Nexus about the threat of AI, and more specifically what some call "artificial general intelligence" or AGI, which is a shorthand term for something that approaches human-like intelligence. As I tried to point out in that
Does it feel like you are living in a bubble? According to a lot of experts, you are – a bubble created by hysteria related to a little thing known as artificial intelligence, which you may have heard of. Even Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI – and therefore the man who
If you pay attention to the news at all, you may have seen a host of alarming headlines recently about how the number of Americans who say they read for pleasure has declined sharply over the past 20 years, from a peak of 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent
The current battle over regulating speech online seems new, in part because the Trump government and its allies are going to extreme lengths to police speech about the murder of Charlie Kirk (a man who trumpeted the benefits of free speech, but is now the reason why people are losing
If you've been following the online discourse at all (and I would encourage you not to do too much of that, especially now) you may have seen a number of journalists and other commentators arguing that the blame for a big part of the unrest that we are
When AI engines or LLMs (large-language models) such as ChatGPT started to become popular, one of the main concerns some people had was the widespread crawling and indexing of content that companies like OpenAI and Anthropic engaged in while training these models, and that this is a form of theft.
A little over a year ago, things looked fairly bleak for Google on the legal front (and on other fronts, but we'll get to that). In August last year, Judge Amit Mehta of the District of Columbia handed down a decision in the US government's antitrust
Ever since artificial intelligence became a topic of popular conversation, the environmental cost of all these large-language models and the massive server farms that make them possible has been the subject of much concern. Every week or two, it seems, there is another article about the vast appetite these systems
I know what many of you may be thinking now, as you read the headline of this post. You might be remembering the photo reproduced below, in which Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen (who, it must be said, has a large and rather egg-shaped head, no offense intended) is
OpenAI recently released a new version of its ChatGPT artificial-intelligence engine, called GPT-5. Normally, I wouldn't choose to write about the latest iteration of a product that is in its fifth generation, especially since GPT-5 doesn't seem radically different in most important ways from GPT-4. In
Let's all agree, for the sake of argument, that there's a lot of bad stuff on the old interwebs, okay? I mean, there's some really bad stuff – and not just porn, but violence and death and that sort of thing. I would rather not
In a recent essay in Asterisk magazine entitled Scapegoating the Algorithm, Cambridge PhD and social scientist Dan Williams wrote that there seems to be a sense that the United States (and possibly other parts of the world) is going through an epistemic crisis, which he describes as a "breakdown
Ever since Google climbed onto the artificial intelligence bandwagon last year by announcing that AI results would start appearing at the top of search pages, there has been a suspicion that by using AI to provide answers, Google would inevitably wind up displacing websites and media companies whose businesses depend