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The response to my recent story, “The AI jobs crisis is here, now”, has been pretty overwhelming. The piece, which examines how the language-learning app Duolingo fired its writers and translators to go all-in on AI, how DOGE uses an “AI-first strategy” to justify firing tens of thousands of…

My new piece in Tech Policy Press is up, and it’s about the recent re-emergence of very silly chatter about whether AI “experiences the world” and therefore ought to have something akin to human rights. In the piece, I argue that they don’t need them. Here’s how it starts:

Few…

On Monday, April 29th, Luis von Ahn, the billionaire CEO of the popular language learning app Duolingo, made a public announcement that his company is officially "going to be AI-first.” Duolingo, he wrote in an email to all employees that was also posted to LinkedIn, will “gradually stop using contractors…

The social media discourse seems to constantly come back to the question of whether Large Language Models are “useful (good)” or “useless (bad).” The responses are a bizarre back and forth in which one group says they use it often and another group says they nobody uses it at all.

Tomorrow, April 24th, is Take Your Child to Work Day, an occasion on which many federal workers would typically bring their kids into the office. This year, any celebratory mood will likely be dampened by the sweeping layoffs ordered by Elon Musk’s DOGE, which has fired tens of thousands…

Greetings all,

Hope everyone’s hanging in. The big news this week: Elon Musk is finally stepping back from DOGE. On an earnings call that revealed Tesla’s net income had fallen 71% in the first quarter of 2025, Musk announced that, starting in May, his “time allocation to DOGE will…

A guided tour of the NCM Melbourne's "Signal to Noise" exhibition.

In the age of computation, the role of noise — or at least, the close-enough approximation through pseudorandom numbers —…

Last weekend at Coachella, the singer of the punk band the Circle Jerks called for “an army of Luigis,” in reference, of course, to Luigi Mangione, the alleged murderer of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

The statement, which implied the band would like to see more assassins murdering more CEOs, …

Greetings all — 

I’ve got something a little different today: The first original BITM guest post, from the great writer and editor Mike Pearl. Mike is a former VICE columnist, the author of The Day It Finally Happens, a frequent contributor to the New Republic, and a good…

I’m old enough to remember when Black Mirror first dropped, and the anthology sci-fi show was widely received as transgressive, even shocking. Here was a smart, often legitimately unsettling suite of dark modern Twilight Zone fables, all built around the ways new technologies might be used (typically by faceless corporations…