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“AI will steadily be delegated, and could — as it becomes more autonomous — usurp decision making and thinking from current humans and human-run institutions,” said Anthony Aguirre, a cosmologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz and a founder of the Future of Life Institute, the organization behind one of two open letters.

“At some point, it would become clear that the big machine that is running society and the economy is not really under human control, nor can it be turned off, any more than the S&P 500 could be shut down,” he said.

Are there signs A.I. could do this?Not quite. But researchers are transforming chatbots like ChatGPT into systems that can take actions based on the text they generate. A project called AutoGPT is the prime example.

I’m convinced that the ability to get good, if not great, care in facilities that aren’t competing with one another is the main way that other countries obtain great outcomes for much less money. It also allows for more regulation and control to keep a lid on prices.

Because of government subsidies, most people spend less than 25 percent of their income on housing and can choose between buying new flats at highly subsidized prices or flats available for resale on an open market.

Other social determinants that matter include food security, access to education and even race. As part of New Zealand’s reforms, its Public Health Agency, which was established less than a year ago, specifically puts a “greater emphasis on equity and the wider determinants of health such as income, education and housing.” It also specifically seeks to address racism in health care, especially that which affects the Maori population.

Hyper Voisins, thanks both to its size and the sheer diversity of its activities, goes much further. About 5,000 people, he believes, is the maximum, but, with his group as a model, he has proposed to Paris authorities that they encourage 150 more to be set up. “That would be 750,000 people, a third of the population,” he said. “We would change the face of Paris and turn it into a convivial city.”

Among the 1,000 diners, there were also a few hundred from other parts of the city, who are welcome to sign up and come along.

Roberdeau now praises the scheme for having changed her life: a few years ago, after she was widowed, her daughter, worried about how long she could go on living alone, tried to persuade her to move into a retirement home nearer to her in Charente-Maritime, 300 miles to the south. “I didn’t want to leave the area or the apartment where I spent the last years with my husband,” said Roberdeau. Thanks to the support she gets from her neighbours, she has been able to remain.

HGTV is regularly a top-five cable channel—and its growing popularity has coincided with a huge increase in actual renovations. In the 1990s, American homeowners spent an average of more than $90 billion annually on remodeling their homes. By 2020, it was more than $400 billion

For homeowners, pressure to keep up with the Joneses has reached a logical extreme. Everywhere you look, there are new reasons to be unhappy with your house, and new trends you can follow to fix it.

Annetta Grant, a professor at Bucknell University who studies the home-renovation market, recently co-authored an ethnography on how home-reno media has changed people’s relationship to their home. She and her fellow researcher, Jay Handelman, conducted extensive interviews with 17 people in the process of renovating their home, attended a consumer-renovation expo, interviewed renovation-service providers, and consumed dozens of hours and hundreds of pages of home-reno media.

Legally, it appears as though LAION was able to scour what seems like the entire internet because it deems itself a nonprofit organization engaging in academic research. While it was funded at least in part by Stability AI, the company that created Stable Diffusion, it is technically a separate entity. Stability AI then used its nonprofit research arm to create A.I. generators first via Stable Diffusion and then commercialized in a new model called DreamStudio.

hat makes up these data sets? Well, pretty much everything. For artists, many of us had what amounted to our entire portfolios fed into the data set without our consent. This means that A.I. generators were built on the backs of our copyrighted work, and through a legal loophole, they were able to produce copies of varying levels of sophistication.

eing able to imitate a living artist has obvious implications for our careers, and some artists are already dealing with real challenges to their livelihood.

Increasingly, it feels possible to take stock not just of what happened but also of the inadequacy of some of the stories we told ourselves to make sense of the mess.

This week, I want to consider two prominent frameworks about the pandemic that are nevertheless rarely considered alongside each other: disparities in Covid mortality by race and by partisanship.

Partisanship was a huge driver of that more significant second-year failure, since Republican resistance to vaccination explains a large share of cumulative American Covid mortality

LEDs are now dimmable, with their light available in a range of colors, some warmer, some cooler. They are stealthy and can assume the familiar forms of old-fashioned bulbs or disappear altogether into the fixture, manifesting themselves only as bright beams.

. LEDs use 90 percent less energy and last up to 25 times longer than incandescent bulbs.

In the early days, when LEDs lasted a mere 25,000 hours, they couldn’t be swapped after burning out, making the entire lamp defunct. Now they have life spans of 50,000 hours and are more likely to be replaceable.

“Programming will be obsolete,” Matt Welsh, a former engineer at Google and Apple, predicted recently. Welsh now runs an A.I. start-up, but his prediction, while perhaps self-serving, doesn’t sound implausible:

I believe the conventional idea of “writing a program” is headed for extinction, and indeed, for all but very specialized applications, most software, as we know it, will be replaced by A.I. systems that are trained rather than programmed. In situations where one needs a “simple” program … those programs will, themselves, be generated by an A.I. rather than coded by hand.

there’s also a way in which A.I. could mark the beginning of a new kind of programming — one that doesn’t require us to learn code but instead transforms human-language instructions into software. An A.I. “doesn’t care how you program it — it will try to understand what you mean,” Jensen Huang, the chief executive of the chip-making company Nvidia, said in a speech this week at the Computex conference in Taiwan. He added: “We have closed the digital divide. Everyone is a programmer now — you just have to say something to the computer.”

Twitter executives deceived federal regulators and the company’s own board of directors about “extreme, egregious deficiencies” in its defenses against hackers, as well as its meager efforts to fight spam, according to an explosive whistleblower complaint from its former security chief.

The complaint from former head of security Peiter Zatko, a widely admired hacker known as “Mudge,” depicts Twitter as a chaotic and rudderless company beset by infighting, unable to properly protect its 238 million daily users including government agencies, heads of state and other influential public figures.

Among the most serious accusations in the complaint, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, is that Twitter violated the terms of an 11-year-old settlement with the Federal Trade Commission by falsely claiming that it had a solid security plan. Zatko’s complaint alleges he had warned colleagues that half the company’s servers were running out-of-date and vulnerable software and that executives withheld dire facts about the number of breaches and lack of protection for user data, instead presenting directors with rosy charts measuring unimportant changes.

The global human population has been climbing for the past two centuries. But what is normal for all of us alive today — growing up while the world is growing rapidly — may be a blip in human history.

All of the predictions agree on one thing: We peak soon.

then we shrink. Humanity will not reach a plateau and then stabilize. It will begin an unprecedented decline.

On a Monday morning in April, Sam Altman sat inside OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters, telling me about a dangerous artificial intelligence that his company had built but would never release. His employees, he later said, often lose sleep worrying about the AIs they might one day release without fully appreciating their dangers.

He wanted me to know that whatever AI’s ultimate risks turn out to be, he has zero regrets about letting ChatGPT loose into the world. To the contrary, he believes it was a great public service.

Altman can still remember where he was the first time he saw GPT-4 write complex computer code, an ability for which it was not explicitly designed. “It was like, ‘Here we are,’ ”

I gave a talk to a class at Northeastern University earlier this month, concerning technology, journalism, and the cultural professions. The students were bright and inquisitive, though they also reflected the current dynamic in higher ed overall - three quarters of the students who showed up were women, and the men who were there almost all sat moodily in the back and didn’t engage at all while their female peers took notes and asked questions. I know there’s a lot of criticism of the “crisis for boys” narrative, but it’s often hard not to believe in it.

we’re actually living in a period of serious technological stagnation - that despite our vague assumption that we’re entitled to constant remarkable scientific progress, humanity has been living with real and valuable but decidedly small-scale technological growth for the past 50 or 60 or 70 years, after a hundred or so years of incredible growth from 1860ish to 1960ish, give or take a decade or two on either side

I will recommend Robert J. Gordon’s The Rise & Fall of American Growth for an exhaustive academic (and primarily economic) argument to this effect. Gordon persuasively demonstrates that from the mid-19th to mid-20th century, humanity leveraged several unique advancements that had remarkably outsized consequences for how we live and changed our basic existence in a way that never happened before and hasn’t since. Principal among these advances were the process of refining fossil fuels and using them to power all manner of devices and vehicles, the ability to harness electricity and use it to safely provide energy to homes (which practically speaking required the first development), and a revolution in medicine that came from the confluence of long-overdue acceptance of germ theory and basic hygienic principles, the discovery and refinement of antibiotics, and the modernization of vaccines.

Although neither RSV nor flu is shaping up to be particularly mild this year, says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, both appear to be behaving more within their normal bounds.

But infections are still nowhere near back to their pre-pandemic norm. They never will be again. Adding another disease—COVID—to winter’s repertoire has meant exactly that: adding another disease, and a pretty horrific one at that, to winter’s repertoire.

“The probability that someone gets sick over the course of the winter is now increased,” Rivers told me, “because there is yet another germ to encounter.” The math is simple, even mind-numbingly obvious—a pathogenic n+1 that epidemiologists have seen coming since the pandemic’s earliest days. Now we’re living that reality, and its consequences.

Beginning in the eighth century B.C., Ancient Rome grew from a small town on central Italy’s Tiber River into an empire that at its peak encompassed most of continental Europe, Britain, much of western Asia, northern Africa and the Mediterranean islands

After 450 years as a republic, Rome became an empire in the wake of Julius Caesar

s rise and fall in the first century B.C.