BlogFlockGreetings all,
So I spent much of the week traveling, and the rest of it sick. But I’m back from a long and good and productive SXSW, where I did a featured talk with the great crypto skeptic Molly White, a chat at the LightHouse about generative AI and…
Over at Tech Policy Press, I wrote about the government commission that lead to the creation of the 1974 Privacy Act, and how an expanding AI state puts the values of privacy from government surveillance at risk.
The Privacy Act was created as a response to the growing presence…
It's been a busy few weeks, but I'm on a panel for the latest podcast of Tech Policy Press' "Sunday Show" alongside Borhane Blili-Hamelin and Margaret Mitchell to discuss a paper we co-authored – with a slew of additional authors – called "Stop Treating AGI as the North Star…
Greetings all — I’m in Austin at SXSW for the weekend; if you’re around give a shout. Yesterday, I had a great chat with crypto skeptic Molly White; tomorrow I’ll be talking generative AI and labor at the Lighthouse. Monday, I’ll join the 404 Media folks to talk about…
It’s been two and a half years since generative AI has become Silicon Valley’s consensus product, and the industry’s standard line in promoting that product goes something like this: AI is powerful and even scary, but it’s going to make our lives easier, do work we don’t want to…
The jarring news that every single employee of the widely respected 18F team was laid off over the weekend has already begun to recede from view. Or more accurately, it’s already become obscured by other disasters and indignities. But it’s worth pausing to fully grasp what just happened. The wholesale…
Hey folks,
Hope everyone’s hanging in as things oscillate wildly between bad and embarrassing and worse out there. As for me, I’ve been all over the place, which has not helped keep the head from spinning any less. The Friday before last, I gave a talk to a group of…
Like a lot of journalists following DOGE’s campaign to gut the government, I’ve been reading a lot of posts on r/FedNews and r/FedEmployees, the communities on Reddit where workers are sharing info, mutual support and solidarity, and ideas about how to deal with Elon Musk’s wrecking ball. And I’ve…
The “What did you do last week?” emails were bad enough. Sent out at the behest of Elon Musk’s DOGE team, the terse note exhorted two million government workers to justify their jobs with a list of five “bullets” of things they accomplished, or, per Musk, face termination. The…
Last week, when J.D. Vance delivered his first foreign speech as vice president at an international AI summit in Paris, he took the opportunity to put forward what the New York Times called a “vision of a coming era of American technological domination.” The Times is soft pedaling what Vance…
Tech critic Paris Marx provides the critical take on Silicon Valley you’ve been missing
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