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Japan’s largest telecommunications company and the country’s biggest newspaper called for speedy legislation to restrain generative artificial intelligence, saying democracy and social order could collapse if AI is left unchecked.

the manifesto points to rising concern among American allies about the AI programs U.S.-based companies have been at the forefront of developing.

The Japanese companies’ manifesto, while pointing to the potential benefits of generative AI in improving productivity, took a generally skeptical view of the technology

Despite all the marketed use cases, the most impressive aspect of it is the immersive video

Watching a movie, however, feels like you’ve been transported into the content.

that raises serious questions about how we perceive the world and what we consider reality. Big tech companies are desperate to rush this technology out but it’s not clear how much they’ve been worrying about the consequences.

one night in October she logged on to character.ai – a neural language model that can impersonate anyone from Socrates to Beyoncé to Harry Potter – and, with a few clicks, built herself a personal “psychologist” character. From a list of possible attributes, she made her bot “caring”, “supportive” and “intelligent”. “Just what you would want the ideal person to be,” Christa tells me. She named her Christa 2077: she imagined it as a future, happier version of herself.

Since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, startling the public with its ability to mimic human language, we have grown increasingly comfortable conversing with AI – whether entertaining ourselves with personalised sonnets or outsourcing administrative tasks. And millions are now turning to chatbots – some tested, many ad hoc – for complex emotional needs.

ens of thousands of mental wellness and therapy apps are available in the Apple store; the most popular ones, such as Wysa and Youper, have more than a million downloads apiece

What’s still difficult is to encode human values

That currently requires an extra step known as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, in which programmers use their own responses to train the model to be helpful and accurate. Meanwhile, so-called “red teams” provoke the program in order to uncover any possible harmful outputs

This combination of human adjustments and guardrails is designed to ensure alignment of AI with human values and overall safety. So far, this seems to have worked reasonably well.

He shares with Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker, and Slavoj Žižek a zeal for theorizing widely, though he surpasses them in his taste for provocative simplifications.

In medieval Europe, he explains, “Knowledge = Scriptures x Logic,” whereas after the scientific revolution, “Knowledge = Empirical Data x Mathematics.”

Silicon Valley’s recent inventions invite galaxy-brain cogitation of the sort Harari is known for. The larger you feel the disruptions around you to be, the further back you reach for fitting analogies

leven years ago, Stephen West was stocking groceries at a Safeway warehouse in Seattle. He was 24, and had been working to support himself since dropping out of high school at 16. Homeless at times, he had mainly grown up in group homes and foster-care programs up and down the West Coast after being taken away from his family at 9. He learned to find solace in books.

He would tell himself to be grateful for the work: “It’s manual, physical labor, but it’s better than 99.9 percent of jobs that have ever existed in human history.” By the time most kids have graduated from college, he had consumed “the entire Western canon of philosophy.”

A notable advantage of packing boxes in a warehouse all day is that rote, solitary work can be accomplished with headphones on. “I would just queue up audio books and listen and pause and think about it and contextualize as much as I could,” he told me. “I was at work for eight hours a day. Seven hours of it would be spent reading philosophy, listening to philosophy; a couple hours interpreting it, just thinking about it. In the last hour of the day, I’d turn on a podcast.”

For about five years, OpenAI used a system of nondisclosure agreements to stifle public criticism from outgoing employees. Current and former OpenAI staffers were paranoid about talking to the press. In May, one departing employee refused to sign and went public in The Times. The company apologized and scrapped the agreements. Then the floodgates opened. Exiting employees began criticizing OpenAI’s safety practices, and a wave of articles emerged about its broken promises.

These stories came from people who were willing to risk their careers to inform the public. How many more are silenced because they’re too scared to speak out? Since existing whistle-blower protections typically cover only the reporting of illegal conduct, they are inadequate here. Artificial intelligence can be dangerous without being illegal

A.I. needs stronger protections — like those in place in parts of the public sector, finance and publicly traded companies — that prohibit retaliation and establish anonymous reporting channels.

By drawing upon the authority of Montaigne, who begins his essay “Of Books” with what would be regarded on both Wall Street and Capitol Hill as a career-ending display of transparency:

I have no doubt that I often speak of things which are better treated by the masters of the craft, and with more truth. This is simply a trial [essai] of my natural faculties, and not of my acquired ones. If anyone catches me in ignorance, he will score no triumph over me, since I can hardly be answerable to another for my reasonings, when I am not answerable for them to myself, and am never satisfied with them. . . .

When I was thirty I assumed that by the time I was fifty I would know what I was talking about. The notice didn’t arrive in the mail. At fifty I knew less than what I thought I knew at thirty, and so I figured that by the time I was seventy, then surely, this being America, where all the stories supposedly end in the key of C major, I would have come up with a reason to believe that I had been made wise. Now I’m seventy-five, and I see no sign of a dog with a bird in its mouth.

A group of OpenAI insiders is blowing the whistle on what they say is a culture of recklessness and secrecy at the San Francisco artificial intelligence company, which is racing to build the most powerful A.I. systems ever created.

The group, which includes nine current and former OpenAI employees, has rallied in recent days around shared concerns that the company has not done enough to prevent its A.I. systems from becoming dangerous.

The members say OpenAI, which started as a nonprofit research lab and burst into public view with the 2022 release of ChatGPT, is putting a priority on profits and growth as it tries to build artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., the industry term for a computer program capable of doing anything a human can.

The last time there was a major slowdown in the mighty network of ocean currents that shapes the climate around the North Atlantic, it seems to have plunged Europe into a deep cold for over a millennium.

That was roughly 12,800 years ago, when not many people were around to experience it. But in recent decades, human-driven warming could be causing the currents to slow once more, and scientists have been working to determine whether and when they might undergo another great weakening, which would have ripple effects for weather patterns across a swath of the globe.

A pair of researchers in Denmark this week put forth a bold answer: A sharp weakening of the currents, or even a shutdown, could be upon us by century’s end.

A central roadblock, the psychologist Keith Payne writes, is that people employ “flexible reasoning.” By conceding here and asserting there, they evade our queries, leading us into mazes of rationalization. Once we’re in the maze, it can seem as though these people don’t have stable beliefs, or don’t believe things in the usual way.

In “Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America’s Dangerous Divide,” Payne recounts arguing with his brother, who supported Trump, about whether the 2020 election was stolen. “I didn’t know how I could relate to him if he embraced Trump’s lie,” Payne recalls. To Payne’s great relief, his brother rejected Trump’s denialism, writing, on Facebook, that “by the letter of the law, yes, Biden won.” Yet his brother went on to say, “I think there was some malfeasance there in areas, I do. But it can’t be proven.” Like many people, Payne concludes, his brother had arrived at a kind of semi-belief, which allowed him both to acknowledge reality and “to hold on to the larger feeling that Biden’s victory was, deep down, illegitimate.”

It’s tempting to assume that only one’s political opponents are this slippery. But flexible reasoning, in Payne’s view, is “a bipartisan affair.

he said he was appalled at being replaced by a machine-generated substitute. “I was very angry that real, deep talks and real interviews with real people were replaced with something totally fake.”

An online petition drafted by Mr. Zaleski, the terminated culture show host, and Mateusz Demski, a fellow presenter who also lost his job, warned that “the case of Off Radio Krakow is an important reminder for the entire industry” and a “dangerous precedent that hits us all.”

Felix Simon, the author of a report published in February on the effect of A.I. on journalism, said the Polish experiment had not altered his view that technology “aids news workers rather than replaces them.” For the moment, he added, “there is still reason to believe it will not bring the big jobs wipeout some people fear.”

I had never noticed the void before, because I had never been moved to ask the questions Who am I? What is life for? Now I couldn’t seem to escape them, and I received no answers from an empty sky.

a “moist spot” on one of his lungs. That and a slight fever suggest tuberculosis, requiring him to remain for an indeterminate time. Both diagnosis and treatment are dubious, but they thrill Hans Castorp: This hermetic world has begun to cast a spell on him and provoke questions “about the meaning and purpose of life” that he’d never asked down in the flatlands. Answered at first with “hollow silence,” they demand extended contemplation that’s possible only on the magic mountain.

I fell under the spell of Hans Castorp’s quest story, as the Everyman hero is transformed by his explorations of time, illness, sciences and séances, politics and religion and music.

Demis Hassabis, the head of Google DeepMind, repeated in August his suggestion from earlier this year that AGI could arrive by 2030, adding that “we could cure most diseases within the next decade or two.”

A month later, even Meta’s more typically grounded chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, said he expected powerful and all-knowing AI assistants within years, or perhaps a decade

Dario Amodei, the chief executive of the rival AI start-up Anthropic, wrote in a sprawling self-published essay last week that such ultra-powerful AI “could come as early as 2026.” He predicts that the technology will end disease and poverty and bring about “a renaissance of liberal democracy and human rights,” and that “many will be literally moved to tears” as they behold these accomplishments.

Twenty years ago I published a book about politics in my home state of Kansas where white, working-class voters seemed to be drifting into the arms of right-wing movements. I attributed this, in large part, to the culture wars, which the right framed in terms of working-class agony. Look at how these powerful people insult our values!, went the plaint, whether they were talking about the theory of evolution or the war on Christmas.

This was worth pointing out because working people were once the heart and soul of left-wing parties all over the world

I also wrote about the way the Democrats were gradually turning away from working people and their concerns. Just think of all those ebullient Democratic proclamations in the ’90s about trade and tech and globalization and financial innovation.

the significance of the election extends way beyond these specific issues, and represents a decisive rejection by American voters of liberalism and the particular way that the understanding of a “free society” has evolved since the 1980s.

Following Tuesday’s vote, it now seems that it was the Biden presidency that was the anomaly, and that Trump is inaugurating a new era in US politics and perhaps for the world as a whole. Americans were voting with full knowledge of who Trump was and what he represented. Not only did he win a majority of votes and is projected to take every single swing state, but the Republicans retook the Senate and look like holding on to the House of Representatives. Given their existing dominance of the Supreme Court, they are now set to hold all the major branches of government.

All of these groups were unhappy with a free-trade system that eliminated their livelihoods even as it created a new class of super-rich, and were unhappy as well with progressive parties that seemingly cared more for foreigners and the environment than their own condition.

The collapse of the five-year-old Observatory is the latest and largest of a series of setbacks to the community of researchers who try to detect propaganda and explain how false narratives are manufactured, gather momentum and become accepted by various groups

It follows Harvard’s dismissal of misinformation expert Joan Donovan, who in a December whistleblower complaint alleged he university’s close and lucrative ties with Facebook parent Meta led the university to clamp down on her work, which was highly critical of the social media giant’s practices.

Starbird said that while most academic studies of online manipulation look backward from much later, the Observatory’s “rapid analysis” helped people around the world understand what they were seeing on platforms as it happened.

simply tossing your résumé and cover letter into a company’s job portal has a low probability of success, especially now. It’s so easy to submit applications that companies are being bombarded with thousands of them. Human beings can’t possibly review all of them, so they’re reviewed by computers, which simply search for keywords. They don’t understand in any deep way either the applicant’s qualities or the employer’s needs.

“The better writer you are, the greater your chance of getting rejected, because you won’t use keywords” the way the evaluation algorithm wants,

Personal contact is crucial, he said. Rather than spraying applications far and wide, he recommends focusing on a handful of companies, researching them in depth and contacting a wide range of people connected with them, even their suppliers and customers.

Tech companies like to make two grand pronouncements about the future of artificial intelligence. First, the technology is going to usher in a revolution akin to the advent of fire, nuclear weapons, and the internet.

And second, it is going to cost almost unfathomable sums of money.

Silicon Valley has already triggered tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars of spending on AI, and companies only want to spend more.