automation

For all the bluster about generative artificial intelligence upending the world, the technology has yet to meaningfully transform white-collar work. Workers are dabbling with chatbots for tasks such as drafting emails, and companies are…

When the Ordinals system was first released, it divided bitcoiners. Inscriptions were a near-instant hit, but some felt they were a bastardization of bitcoin’s true purpose—as a system for peer-to-peer payments—or had a “reflexive allergic…

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…

A few months ago, I was called in at the last minute to participate in an onstage fireside chat at an Authors’ Guild event. (I’m on the nonprofit’s council, but of course I speak here only for myself.) Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger and I spent…

Many people—like, say, journalists—are understandably antsy about what generative artificial intelligence might mean for the future of their profession. It doesn’t help that expert prognostications on the matter offer a confusing cocktail…

As games like Baldur’s Gate 3, Alan Wake II, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Spider-Man 2, and so many more marked 2023 as a year of instant hits and commercial success, developers were suffering. Layoffs rolled across the…

So far, 2024 is off to a start that looks a lot like 2023—with a week full of job cuts from tech companies.Duolingo cut 10 percent of its contractors earlier this week, citing artificial intelligence as part of the reason. Twitch announced…

In the decades to come, 2023 may be remembered as the year of generative AI hype, where ChatGPT became arguably the fastest-spreading new technology in human history and expectations of AI-powered riches became commonplace. The year 2024…

In 2016, I wrote about an internet that affected the world in a direct, physical manner. It was connected to your smartphone. It had sensors like cameras and thermostats. It had actuators: thermostats, drones, autonomous cars. And it had…

If you’ve worried that candidate-screening algorithms could be standing between you and your dream job, reading Hilke Schellmann’s The Algorithm won’t ease your mind. The investigative reporter and NYU journalism professor’s new book…