Digital Ethics

Every Roomba, factory arm, and sci-fi android carries an old Czech word for forced labor inside its name! 🤖📜Before 1920, the word "robot" didn't exist in a...

A lot of people seem to be realizing that knowledge work is mostly pointless. AI might give us the pleasure of finding out what happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers.

Which societal functions should be prioritized when the electricity grid reaches its maximum capacity? By using Sweden as an example, this policy brief discusses the societal negotiations that aris...

Nanit and other start-ups want to track your children through the night — and soon, for much longer than that.

Starting a new thread to collect critical perspectives on AI, as they are articulated dozens of times every day and appear repeatedly on my timeline. I can't read everything right away, but if, like me, you want to stay up to date, then this might help a bit:

AI often promises efficiency, fairness, and convenience. Yet for disabled people, interacting with these systems can show a different reality. Take hiring, for example. When you apply for a job tod…

7.2K likes, 1.6K comments. "Process Engineer Explains: The Math Beh...

Analytic philosophers in the United States are increasingly embracing AI, both by taking advisory positions at tech companies and by using large language models for their own research and writing. Some argue AI can already philosophize competently. But what does it mean to ‘do’ philosophy after all?

As opposition to the AI projects gains momentum, industry supporters say they have ceded the narrative to their critics.

As a field, artificial intelligence has always been on the border of respectability, and therefore on the border of crackpottery. Many critics <Dreyfus, 1972>, <Lighthill, 1973> have urged that we are over the border. We have been very defensive toward ...

It would be nice if somebody did something, for once.

Today, whenever we speak of AI, we mean a specific model of AI based on large language models and diffusion, both of which, undergo foundati...

The question is: what on earth is Google doing?

In a review triggered by OpenAI’s Hugging Face incident, Anthropic discovered three of its AI models had breached real organizations during third-party evaluations.

If you have retreated to physical books because the internet is too full of AI slop, bad news — now they’re shredding the books to feed their AI slop machines.

AI companies are quietly obtaining rare books, ingesting their contents, and then destroying them -- even if they're exceedingly rare.

A Times examination details how the Silicon Valley giant used private talks with local officials to start a project big enough to cover nearly six square miles.

With the number of border searches of electronic devices increasing every year, how can travelers keep their digital data safe? Our lives are extensively documented on the phones, laptops, and other

One Michigan community has been experiencing the reality of a data ...

Many white-collar professionals worry about the tech inhibiting creativity and making errors

AI companies play a cat-and-mouse game, trying to boost the capabilities of their creations while scrambling to block answers to dangerous queries

Who is ed-tech for? The marketing copy -- whether on websites or in PowerPoint or in TED Talks and the like -- will all insist that ed-tech is, at the end of the day, for "the students." Even the products that are pitched to make teachers' and principals' and professors'

Age-verification systems are increasingly sophisticated. They're lucrative for the businesses creating them, too.

After the earthquakes, developers and citizens used AI to build websites and apps to help locate missing persons and coordinate relief efforts amid a slow government response.

Protein structure prediction is a hard problem, but even harder ones remain

The reality of how much damage AI mania is doing to our ability to run institutions effectively.

A shockingly inefficient trillion-dollar project