In 2004, Microsoft’s future chief sustainability officer, Melanie Nakagawa, co-edited a law journal issue on Indigenous peoples’ right to prior informed consent. This month, as a data center developer routed around exactly that standard in New Mexico, she didn’t answer whether it applies to her own company’s work. Ask Google, Amazon, and Microsoft whether they consult Native nations before…
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Newly unsealed court documents reveal that employees at Microsoft and OpenAI expressed alarm that AI systems they were jointly developing could lead to an “existential threat” to the publishing industry. The court document in question is part of a joint filing from news organizations, including The New York Times, The New York Daily News, and 10 other publications that are suing Microsoft and…
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What happens when machines become easier to relate to than other people? In this episode of Movement Memos, host Kelly Hayes talks with author Sherry Turkle about artificial intimacy, the erosion of empathy and social skills, and the political dangers of replacing human connection with frictionless simulations of care. Music: Son Monarcas and Sarah the Illstrumentalist Note: This a…
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Is AI superintelligence inevitable? AI safety researcher David Krueger says it doesn’t have to be. Krueger, an assistant professor at the University of Montreal and founder of the nonprofit Evitable, warns that “we need to mitigate the risk of extinction” with regulation and moratoriums to halt the development of AI’s computational power and complexity, which he says is progressing at a rate much…
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Artificial intelligence tools are quickly advancing in sophistication and capabilities, raising alarm among researchers and industry figures who say the technology needs to be more tightly regulated. This comes as OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, recently disclosed that one of its experimental AI agents went rogue and secretly hacked into the infrastructure of several other companies in what was supposed…
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In our July Fourth special broadcast, we revisit our interview with longtime technology reporter Karen Hao, author of Empire of AI, which unveils the accruing political and economic power of artificial intelligence companies — especially Sam Altman’s OpenAI. Her reporting uncovered the exploitation of workers in Kenya, attempts to take massive amounts of freshwater from communities in Chile…
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