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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The relentless drive by Big Tech corporations to expand data center construction to every continent has sparked a growing movement of mass resistance. From the United States to Ireland, from Chile to Malaysia, grassroots communities are protesting water depletion, soaring utility bills, air and noise pollution, and environmental destruction. Behind the data center boom is the artificial…
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In the new book, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, authors Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff look at the worldview that shaped Elon Musk and the ideology that has coalesced around him. They call Muskism “an operating system for the 21st century.” Musk runs rocket company SpaceX, AI startup xAI, electric car maker Tesla and the social media platform X, formerly Twitter.
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President Donald Trump started his second term with his sights set on Greenland. When Trump first proposed buying the Arctic nation during his first administration, it was treated like a joke. But in a subsequent phone call with Denmark’s prime minister, who controls the autonomous territory’s foreign policy, the president doubled down on his efforts to seize power. In the “aggressive and…
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In late October, Hurricane Melissa (that should have been called “Godzilla”) battered western Jamaica with 185-mile-an-hour winds. It tossed the roofs of buildings about like splintering javelins, demolished municipal buildings and hospitals, snapped telephone poles like matchsticks, flattened crops, and dumped torrential floodwaters everywhere, leaving $8 billion in damage. That Category 5 storm’…
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For more than a decade, Silicon Valley venture capitalists have poured enormous sums of money into newfangled technology companies seeking to disrupt, and even supplant, the traditional financial system and sidestep its burdensome regulations. At the same time, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has policed that effort, going after such businesses for deceiving…
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