We create technology to do our jobs, but end up working more — and more like machines — This is an occasional cross-post from my Substack newsletter, Modern Hell. Please consider subscribing to Modern Hell for more updates like this one. Recently, I was trying to find a good example of people fearing the machines they made. The dawn of the 1900s came to mind, as it has…

We need more innocuous lessons in how to recognize AI images — To judge by the general reaction to it, the Pope Coat — the AI-generated image of the Pope Francis wearing a huge designer white puffer coat that went viral last week — was yet another sign of the looming information apocalypse. “The images fooled scores of users, in one of…

A Tik Tok filter makes people sad to see their own young faces. But what are they really nostalgic for? — “There’s this filter on Tik Tok that makes you look young, and now Tik Tok is just full of middle-aged folks being confronted by this and trying to come to terms with — trying to understand where their life went,” the user, @memo_akten, says to the screen in a video…

The next step for the internet is away from personal connectivity — “The end of twitter is taking forever did tolkien write this,” Twitter user @PleaseBeGneiss (its avatar an illustrated rock) posted Tuesday. The joke garnered around 90,000 likes. (In a follow-up the account’s owner tweeted “a ton of people saying it’s actually george rr martin but have you considered i didn’t…

What he’s created is something much more difficult to stop — Among the many surprising things about Alex Jones’s recent trial (he was being sued by the parents of children slain at Sandy Hook — an event he long mislabeled as a hoax — for defamation and emotional damage) was that it didn’t stop him from broadcasting his show every day…

Did Google create a sentient A.I.? A Blade Runner theory of humanity — Last weekend, the Washington Post published a story about a Google software engineer, Blake Lemoine, who thinks the company’s artificial intelligence chatbot generator, Language Model for Dialogue Applications — or LaMDA — is sentient. This he decided after multiple conversations with LaMDA, some of which he published, in which the…

Modern mass culture needs new ideas. Why don’t we have any? — In late May, Justin Timberlake announced that he’d sold his share of rights to his entire song catalogue for $100 million to Hipgnosis Song Management, an intellectual property rights management company listed on the London Stock Exchange. It’s not the only one paying big for back catalogues. Two years ago…

The term ‘mass shooting’ allows too many people to avoid the problem — and the solution — A great place to start to end mass shootings in America is stricter gun control. It feels crazy to have to state this from the outset, but amidst other, certifiably insane suggestions like only having a single door defended by an armed guard or booby-trapping the buildings, it’s necessary to…

Bad ideas are taking over the world. Why is this happening? — If Elon Musk were the only asshole we had to put up with, things might be tolerable. At the very least, we might have the energy to deal with him. …