Colleges and universities have been trying to fight against students using tools like ChatGPT to do class assignments and communicate. But here’s a twist: Professors and educators are now turning to A.I. to prepare lessons, teach, and even grade students’ work. We talk with NYT tech reporter Kashmir Hill about these conflicts on campus. Also, she shares what she learned after giving over her life for a week to A.I. tools, which wrote emails for her, planned her meals, chose what she should wear, and even created video messages for TikTok using her likeness and a clone of her voice.
Surviving Progress explores the dangerous paradox at the heart of modern civilization: what we call “progress” might actually be leading us toward collapse.
Based on Ronald Wright’s concept of the “progress trap,” this documentary journeys through history, economics, biology, and politics to reveal how technological advancement, debt, overconsumption, and ecological destruction are threatening the future of humanity.
Ronald Wright’s bestseller A Short History of Progress inspired this cinematic requiem to progress-as-usual. Throughout human history, what seemed like progress often backfired.
Some of the world’s foremost thinkers, activists, bankers, and scientists challenge us to overcome progress traps, which destroyed past civilizations and lie treacherously embedded in our own.
With powerful visuals, expert commentary, and haunting parallels to the fall of past empires, the film challenges viewers to rethink growth, power, and sustainability. Are we too smart for our own survival, or is there still time to change course?
The following is a talk I gave to open the 2nd Alumni Gathering for the course ‘Leading Through Collapse.’ After 7 years we ended teaching the course, but invited the 300+ alumni to gather. The talk is available as a video, and transcript. I touch on some issues about how to remain outward in our focus, and the importance of thinking about what terms might help engage people in the transformative opportunities of accepting our predicament. Thx for watching or reading! Jem
We chat with linguist and cognitive scientist Hagen Blix about his new book Why We Fear AI (co-authored with computer scientist Ingeborg Glimmer) about how the technical qualities of AI – especially LLM chatbots – take the alienation (and seemingly alien power) of capital to the next level. What happens when the social logic of capital — which appears to be a motive force with no motivator — is channeled through generative technologies that appear to be texts with no author? People see an entity that must be feared and worshipped.
The National Institutes of Health will partner with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid to create a database of Americans with autism, using insurance claims, medical records and smartwatch data.
NIH Director Jayanta Bhattacharya, left, and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speak before a news conference at the Health and Human Services Department on April 22. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Archived WSJ article Meta’s CEO is promoting a future where artificial intelligence is increasingly intertwined with people’s lives
Mark Zuckerberg wants you to have AI friends, an AI therapist and AI business agents.
In Zuckerberg’s vision for a new digital future, artificial-intelligence friends outnumber human companions and chatbot experiences supplant therapists, ad agencies and coders. AI will play a central role in the human experience, the Facebook co-founder and CEO of Meta Platforms has said in a series of recent podcasts, interviews and public appearances.
“I think people are going to want a system that knows them well and that kind of understands them in the way that their feed algorithms do,” Zuckerberg said Tuesday during an onstage interview with Stripe co-founder and president John Collison at Stripe’s annual conference.
Features reporter Ariana Bindman visits SF’s depressing new locale in this column
Sam Altman’s new human verification system, the Orb, was put to the test in downtown San Francisco on May 1, 2025. Ariana Bindman/SFGATE
It’s a cool Thursday morning in downtown San Francisco, and I’m walking up Powell Street through a once-familiar-looking Union Square.
As I stroll past the bones of retail giants, “For Lease” signs mark abandoned storefronts like lurid headstones. I see the empty Uniqlo, H&M and Forever21, along with a vacant Walgreens and the former Diesel outpost, which looms over Market Street like a pillaged kingdom. Overall, the neighborhood feels less like an economic epicenter and more like a consumerist graveyard.
But among these depressing corporate relics is an unusual and perhaps welcome sight: groups of stylish young people with mullets, micro-tattoos and designer clothes hobnobbing inside a new, sleek retail space on Geary Street. From a distance, it’s unclear what, exactly, it’s supposed to be, or what types of products it intends to sell.
Inside, EDM blasts from a coffee cart while baristas pour oat milk lattes and flat whites. In front of them is a wooden, cage-like structure lined with mysterious-looking white spheres. But this isn’t a modern art gallery opening or a new Mac store: hordes of tech enthusiasts and local news crews are here to celebrate the unveiling of Sam Altman’s new — and dystopian — “proof of human” technology, also known as the Orb.
I read this when it came out in 2011, while we were still thinking about Occupy and 2008. Here we are in 2025, and it is still relevant. If you haven’t read it, do yourself a favor.
A packet of hand-scrawled letters found in a stranger’s backpack tells of self-sufficient communities growing from the ruins of California’s housing collapse and the global recession. In unfinished Mojave Desert housing tracts and foreclosure ghost towns on the raw edges of the chaotic cities of the West, people have gathered to grow their own food, school their own children and learn how to live without the poisons of gossip, greed, television, mobile phones and the Internet. Encouraged by an enigmatic wanderer known only as “B,” the communities thrive as more families and workers are discarded by an indifferent system. But this quiet revolution and its simple rituals cannot stay unnoticed for long, because the teachings of “B” threaten an entire structure of power and wealth dependent upon people toiling their lives away to buy things they don’t need.
“But to understand the social mood as embodied by a group like Occupy, it may help to look at literature that captures its zeitgeist. One of the books that seems to have become a standard bearer for the Occupy movement is Ken Layne’s ‘Dignity.’ In a book that can only be described as a series of modern-day letters on the gospel of communal simplicity, you can see what kind of world some of the Occupiers might envision: communities occupying vacant suburban or exurban subdivisions, farming the land themselves, bartering with doctors and the like, and shunning modern technology.” — Minyanville.com
