The Resistance to New Technologies

Cardano’s Lace wallet adds key fixes and usability upgrades as the Van Rossem hard fork moves closer to a late June rollout.

Artificial intelligence is no longer just a Silicon Valley debate: it’s becoming part of Africa’s creative revolution. In Nigeria, filmmakers and digital artists are experimenting with AI tools to create films, archive disappearing oral histories and imagine new African futures. Obinna Okere-keocha, founder of  Naija Artificial Intelligence Film Festival, and  filmmaker Malik Afegbua, use AI to preserve fading oral traditions by creating digital archives.

Claims of nimbyism are a misunderstanding: the movement is about whether regular people have a say in fundamental decisions Since the surreal scene at the 2024 presidential inauguration, when a row of big tech titans took their VIP seats and signaled their new alliance with Maga, the Trump administration has rolled out the red carpet for Silicon Valley’s AI ambitions and shareholder priorities. Washington has doled out billions in lucrative federal subsidies and contracts to the cash-rich sector, bloating an AI bubble that experts warn may imperil the entire economy while prohibiting any guardrails on the fast-moving technology. Continue reading...

Silicon Valley oligarchs worried about the risks their technology posed to the world. They forgot about people.

AI is capable of mimicking a real person. It’s clear this capability exists, and the ethics of using AI for this purpose are often very clear. But increasingly, new applications are leading to ethically murky results.  The good For example, the CEO of a company, or a politician, could choose to create a clone using AI tools, creating a chatbot plus an avatar — a digital twin — that can interact with people on their behalf. Silicon Valley is big on the idea: Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman are working on, or have already created, digital twins of themselves.  Cloned politicians include Pakistan’s Imran Khan, who used an authorized voice clone to campaign from prison, and New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who used voice-cloned robocalls to speak with constituents in languages like Mandarin and Yiddish. This kind of use case is probably ethical — as long as the people interacting know that they’re dealing with a digital clone and not a real person.  The bad The f

Silicon Valley giants have transformed from asset-light cash machines to huge infrastructure investors

Partnership between top startup DeepL and Amazon comes amid concern about Silicon Valley’s monopoly over digital infrastructure AI companies in Europe risk losing their world-leading status in the field of machine translation, industry figures have said, after the decision by one of the continent’s leading startups to partner with Amazon’s cloud computing division provoked alarm. While businesses in the EU have generally lagged behind the US and China in AI adoption, a small group of European companies have cornered the global market for high-quality machine translations for professional use. Continue reading...

Microsoft, Google DeepMind and Elon Musk’s xAI have offered to let the U.S. government access new AI models ahead of their general release, which sets up a new phase in Silicon Valley’s often fractious relationship with the US government’s fear of AI threats, based on the latest report of AI companies offering models to U.S. officials in the name of security review, in the hopes that government analysts can vet frontier AI systems for security threats like cyberattacks and military use before it is exposed for public consumption by developers and users, and, inevitably, those who should have no business […]