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Joel Lewenstein, a head of product design at Anthropic, was recently crawling beneath his new house to adjust the irrigation system when he ran into a conundrum: The device’s knobs made no sense. Instead of scouring the internet for a…

Philosopher Nick Bostrom is surprisingly cheerful for someone who has spent so much time worrying about ways that humanity might destroy itself. In photographs he often looks deadly serious, perhaps appropriately haunted by the existential…

I’m a guy “in real life,” but I’ve always played female characters in video games. More and more people say this means I’m either secretly gay/trans or a total creep. Am I allowed to just prefer it? —Gender PlayerDear Player,It sounds like…

This week a startup called Cognition AI caused a bit of a stir by releasing a demo showing an artificial intelligence program called Devin performing work usually done by well-paid software engineers. Chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini can…

“On Extreme Pedantry, there was some discussion about the proper way to load a dishwasher, and I said, ‘Right, I need to create a similar group called Extreme Dishwasher Loading.’ I just went and created the group, and a load of people…

Meta changed how two-factor authentication works for Facebook and Instagram last year. You might have received notifications about this, but it was easy to miss in the platform’s sea of red alerts. OK, so what’s different? “Any devices…

In this scenario, do you still pull the lever and sacrifice the person with the higher Ethical Score to save the five people with lower scores? Or do you allow the trolley to continue on its course, killing the five people with lower…

Everything reminds me of Her. While ChatGPT is not as powerful as the artificial intelligence from Spike Jonze’s sci-fi romance movie, OpenAI’s experimental memory tool for its chatbot seems to suggest a future where bots are highly…

Bitcoin was invented by Satoshi Nakamoto, an enigmatic figure about whom almost nothing is known. Fifteen years ago, Satoshi brought the idea of an electronic cash system into being with the help of a small cast of oddballs. This week, some…

“An artist friend of mine got me an AI-generated painting as a gift. I can see she tried to personalize the concept, and it’s nicely framed, but part of me still feels a little cheated. Is that fair?”—No ReturnsDear No Returns,There’s…