Joshua Rothman / New Yorker: A look at the potential future of personalized, AI-generated entertainment, and how it could both submerge human originality and enable new forms of expression — We're used to algorithms guiding our choices. When machines can effortlessly generate the content we consume, though, what's left for the human imagination?
Alex Barasch / New Yorker: A profile of film studio A24, valued at $3.5B in June 2024, as it focuses on big budget projects and explores AI tools via A24 Labs, drawing mixed reactions — The studio is brilliant at selling small, provocative films. Now it wants to sell blockbusters, too.
Ronan Farrow / New Yorker: The Trump administration's promises of mass deportations may lead to increased use of spyware like Graphite; ICE has a $2M contract with Graphite maker Paragon — Other Western democracies have been roiled by the use of spyware to target political opponents, activists, journalists, and other vulnerable groups.
Andrew Solomon / New Yorker: Parents and US lawmakers are debating whether social media has fueled a teen suicide crisis, as mental health struggles have risen sharply among young Americans — Mental-health struggles have risen sharply among young Americans, and parents and lawmakers alike are scrutinizing life online for answers.
Dhruv Khullar / New Yorker: The use of AI techniques has accelerated and improved drug discovery efforts, in the face of rising antibiotic resistance due to drug overuse — The A.I. revolution is coming to a pharmacy near you. — When I first became a doctor, I cared for an older man whom I'll call Ted.
Kyle Chayka / New Yorker: As social media platforms pivot away from news distribution, a look at news sites like The Verge, which feel more like social media, with aggregation and more — As social networks become less reliable distributors of the news, consumers of digital journalism are seeking out an older form of online real estate.
Anna Wiener / New Yorker: A profile of Holly Herndon, an artist and musician who uses AI in her work and has co-founded Spawning, a company to build a “consent layer for AI” for artists — The artist and musician uses machine learning to make strange, playful work. She also advocates for artists' autonomy in a world shaped by A.I.
Eyal Press / New Yorker: A look at some wrongful arrests in the US due to bad facial recognition matches, and how “automation bias” could lead police to ignore contradictory evidence — Too often, a facial-recognition search represents virtually the entirety of a police investigation.
James Somers / New Yorker: A eulogy for coding, which has always felt like an endlessly deep and rich domain, after ChatGPT swallowed knowledge and skills that take lifetimes to master — Coding has always felt to me like an endlessly deep and rich domain. Now I find myself wanting to write a eulogy for it.
Joshua Rothman / New Yorker: A profile of Geoffrey Hinton, who argues that LLMs like GPT can comprehend the meanings of words and learn how the world works by analyzing human writing — Geoffrey Hinton has spent a lifetime teaching computers to learn. Now he worries that artificial brains are better than ours.
Kyle Chayka / New Yorker: As social networks become cluttered with ads, misinformation, and irrelevant posts, the web just feels less fun, suggesting the old era of social media is over — The social-media Web as we knew it, a place where we consumed the posts of our fellow-humans and posted in return, appears to be over.
Emma Green / New Yorker: A look at Optima Academy Online, an all-virtual school launched in 2022 that lets US parents opt out of public school by putting their kid in a Meta Quest 2 — It's 6 a.m. A little girl, who looks to be about ten years old, hits the button on her alarm clock.
Ronan Farrow / New Yorker: Interviews with 30+ of Elon Musk's colleagues and others detail his growing international power, childhood, career, politics, role in the Ukraine war, and more — How the U.S. government came to rely on the tech billionaire—and is now struggling to rein him in.
Alex Ross / New Yorker: After iTunes failed to save classical music, Apple Music Classical seems an oddly clumsy point of entry, offering some good features but falling short of rivals — As classical listeners shift to streaming, Apple's bespoke app falls short of its smaller-scale competitors.
Michael Schulman / New Yorker: Netflix's Orange Is the New Black was an early indicator of how lopsided the streaming economy would be, as 10 actors from the show detail tiny residual incomes — The innovative and daring show was a worldwide hit for Netflix, but some of the actors say that they were never fairly compensated.
Kyle Chayka / New Yorker: A writer details using AI startup Writer's LLM to generate text in his writing style and says most “insights” that the tool produced felt hollow or approximated — A new wave of artificial-intelligence startups is trying to “scale language” by automating the work of writing.
Julian Lucas / New Yorker: A look at MoMA's “Never Alone” exhibit, featuring a collection of 35 video games, making MoMA one of very few art museums to have a permanent games collection — After years of neglect, art institutions are coming around to games. Can they master the controls?
David D. Kirkpatrick / New Yorker: A look at India's hacking-for-hire industry, which has a tacit alliance with the government and is unusually brazen, with firms publicly touting their services — The country has developed a lucrative specialty: cyberattacks for hire. — In the summer of 2020, Jonas Rey …
Ted Chiang / New Yorker: Similar to McKinsey and other consultancy firms, AI advancements may help concentrate wealth, disempower workers, and “sharpen the knife blade of capitalism” — As it's currently imagined, the technology promises to concentrate wealth and disempower workers. Is an alternative possible?
Jaron Lanier / New Yorker: AI's mythology as a technology for creating intelligent beings instills fear; “data dignity” and seeing AI as a social collaboration could address worries — There are ways of controlling the new technology—but first we have to stop mythologizing it.
Carina Chocano / New Yorker: A profile of Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn, who co-created CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, as he predicts AI will eventually make computers better teachers than humans — The company's founder, Luis von Ahn, believes that artificial intelligence is going to make computers better teachers than humans.
Ed Caesar / New Yorker: An in-depth look at how police agencies across Europe infiltrated encrypted phone networks like EncroChat and Sky ECC that were popular with organized criminals — Drug syndicates and other criminal groups bought into the idea that a new kind of phone network couldn't be infiltrated by cops.
Jay Caspian Kang / New Yorker: Utah's bills restricting kids' social media use have galling civil-liberties concerns and hazy enforcement plans, and will likely face constitutional challenges — Most people seem to agree that something should be done to protect kids from what sure looks like an addictive product.
Ted Chiang / New Yorker: As ChatGPT and other LLMs repackage info into superficial approximations, like lossy compression for images, the web will become a blurrier version of itself — OpenAI's chatbot offers paraphrases, whereas Google offers quotes. Which do we prefer? — In 2013, workers at a German …
James Somers / New Yorker: A look at OpenAI's open-source speech recognition software Whisper, which can transcribe speech in more than 90 languages, outperforming humans in some of them — ChatGPT is in the spotlight, but it's Whisper—OpenAI's open-source speech-transcription program—that shows us where machine learning is going.
Rachel Syme / New Yorker: A profile of Bela Bajaria, Netflix's global head of TV who leads its hyper-aggressive strategy to adapt successful show formats to different parts of the world — Bela Bajaria, who oversees the streaming giant's hyperaggressive approach to TV-making, says success is about “recognizing that people like having more.”
Stephen Witt / New Yorker: A deep dive into the race to develop a quantum computer, which could help address climate change and food scarcity, break current encryption protocols, and more — Such a device could help address climate change and food scarcity, or break the Internet. Will the U.S. or China get there first?
Christopher Byrd / New Yorker: A wide-ranging interview with Cory Doctorow on lessons from science fiction, Big Tech's comeuppance, surveillance capitalism, smart contracts, dApps, and more — A conversation about the “mediocre monopolists” of Big Tech, the weirdness of crypto, and the real lessons of science fiction.
Nate Hopper / New Yorker: A profile of David Mills, who created the Network Time Protocol in the 1980s, as about two dozen Internet Engineering Task Force contributors work toward NTPv5 — An obscure software system synchronizes the network's clocks. Who will keep it running? — In 1977, David Mills …
Cal Newport / New Yorker: Chasing TikTok's success and leaving behind the protection of hard-to-replicate, large social graphs could end the lengthy dominance of platforms like Facebook — Facebook is trying to copy TikTok, but this strategy may well signal the end of these legacy platforms.
Kyle Chayka / New Yorker: Tumblr's internet relic status, exemplified by its chronological feed, has given it new life: 48% of active users are Gen Z and revenue is up 55% since July — The social-media platform's status as a relic of the Internet has attracted prodigal users as well as new ones.
Anna Wiener / New Yorker: If the metaverse takes off, it will take cues from today's privatized, centralized, financialized tech ecosystem and echo the development of play-to-earn games — In a virtual world full of virtual goods, finance could get weird. — Years ago, while on vacation in the Northwest …
D. T. Max / New Yorker: An in-depth look at Welshman James Howells' desperate efforts to excavate his local landfill to recover a hard drive with 8,000 bitcoins mined in 2013 — For years, a Welshman who threw away the key to his cybercurrency stash has been fighting to excavate the local landfill.
Sheelah Kolhatkar / New Yorker: Profile of FTC Chair Lina Khan, as some longtime staffers worry she is underestimating the risks of pursuing aggressive antitrust cases that are likely to fail — As monopolies and other large companies gain increasing control of our daily lives, Khan is Joe Biden's pick to do something about it.
Kyle Chayka / New Yorker: A look at Raya, a secretive subscription-based social network with a rigorous user selection process and a rigid code of silence for accepted members — The app has created a space free of the problems that plague the rest of the Web, but only by leaving almost everybody out.
Daniel A. Gross / New Yorker: As libraries and schools transition to e-books, the value of e-book vendors like OverDrive, which make money by licensing content to libraries, have skyrocketed — Increasingly, books are something that libraries do not own but borrow from the corporations that do.
Matthew Hutson / New Yorker: Profile of Cerebras, which made the world's largest chip by using a “wafer-scale” approach that offers one possibility for AI chips to keep up with Moore's law — In the race to accelerate A.I., the Silicon Valley company Cerebras has landed on an unusual strategy: go big.
Morgen Peck / New Yorker: A look at the rise and fall of Skycoin, a cryptocurrency that had a ~$5B total value in 2018, ran a team of social media “shills”, and was plagued by scandals — The cryptocurrency promised to change the world and make its users rich in the process. Then it began to fall apart.
Helen Rosner / New Yorker: Experts say consent and disclosure are key to the ethical use of synthetic media, amid controversy surrounding Bourdain's deepfake voice in a new documentary — The new documentary “Roadrunner” uses A.I.-generated audio without disclosing it to viewers. How should we feel about that?
Caroline Lester / New Yorker: A look at the rise of BitClout, a burgeoning crypto service monetizing social influence, valued at more than $1B in April, but operating in a legal gray zone — BitClout collapses everything—art, humor, personhood—into money, laying bare just who, and what, we are willing to pay for.
Rachel Monroe / New Yorker: Profile of Kurtis Minder, who for the past year has been managing fraught discussions between companies and hackers as a ransomware negotiator — Kurtis Minder finds the cat-and-mouse energy of outsmarting criminal syndicates deeply satisfying. — A few days after Thanksgiving last year …
Nora Caplan-Bricker / New Yorker: Despite a wave of complaints, pushback from top universities, lawsuits, and accusations of bias, Proctorio's client list grew over 500% from 2019 to 2021 — Despite students' complaints and the coming return to in-person learning, Proctorio and its rivals are betting on a lucrative future.
Katie Engelhart / New Yorker: A deep look at whether social robots can help ease loneliness among the elderly in the US, where 21 states have distributed free robot pets to older residents — For elderly Americans, social isolation is especially perilous. Will machine companions fill the void? — It felt good to love again, in that big empty house.
Anna Wiener / New Yorker: A look at the rise of “renderporn”, the aspirational, hyperrealistic interior design imagery on Instagram created using 3D modelling software like SketchUp — “Renderporn” domesticates the aspiration and surreality of the digital age. — Last spring, several months into the pandemic …
Matthew Hutson / New Yorker: Some AI researchers are increasingly worried about the lack of ethical oversight, with the job often falling to peer reviewers, a stark contrast to other fields — At artificial-intelligence conferences, researchers are increasingly alarmed by what they see.
Jill Lepore / New Yorker: Nations are engaging in a cyberweapons arms race, with agencies like the NSA prioritizing offensive capabilities over defense, fueling a lucrative 0-day market — Amid a global gold rush for digital weapons, the infrastructure of our daily lives has never been more vulnerable.
Simon Parkin / New Yorker: Q&A with Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto on what excites him about his work, his strengths and weaknesses as a boss, not abusing power, ambitions, and more — The legendary designer on rejecting violence in games, trying to be a good boss, and building Nintendo's Disneyland.
Anna Wiener / New Yorker: Profile of Moxie Marlinspike, CEO of Signal, as he defends centralization as a necessary condition for Signal's widespread adoption, and for its ease of use — Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of the end-to-end encrypted messaging service Signal, is “trying to bring normality to the Internet.”
Andrew Marantz / New Yorker: Facebook's ineffective content moderation efforts, unevenly enforced and handled by low-paid moderators, show it can't and doesn't have the will to fix itself — The platform is overrun with hate speech and disinformation. Does it actually want to solve the problem?
Nick Romeo / New Yorker: How Americans can draw upon European thinkers, like Dutch politician Marietje Schaake, to address issues of antitrust, Big Tech, and democratic governance — Last October, a couple of days before joining Stanford University as the international policy director at the Cyber Policy Center …