ideas

In the coming weeks, the US Supreme Court will decide whether to hear a pending case that includes an amicus brief filed by David Sosas. Plural. The David Sosas who signed the brief include “David Sosa, age 32, from Iredell County, North Carolina; David Sosa, age 51, from Mecklenburg, North …

Stan Ulam knew he was moving to New Mexico, but he didn’t know exactly why. Ulam was a Polish-born mathematician—and later, physicist—who first came to the United States in the late 1930s. In 1943, after Ulam had obtained American citizenship and a job at the University of Wisconsin, his colleague …

For centuries, mentalists astounded crowds by seeming to plumb the depth of their souls—effortlessly unearthing audience members’ memories, desires, and thoughts. Now, there’s concern that neuroscientists might be doing the same by developing technologies capable of “decoding” our thoughts and laying bare the hidden contents of our mind. Though neural …

“What do you mean my actions have consequences? I’m literally just a girl.” This year, your feed has likely been blessed by the avatars of machinic girlhood: angels, bimbos, and the collective entity of “girls,” divine creatures who have transcended earthly bodies, curiously evacuated of anger, pain, attachment, who have …

it’s become a veritable meme subgenre at this point: a photo of Linda Hamilton as The Terminator’s Sarah Connor, glaring into the camera, steely eyed, with some variant of the caption “Sarah Connor seeing you become friends with ChatGPT.” Our society has interpreted the sudden, dizzying rise of this new …

In a quaint Regency-era office overlooking London’s Russell Square, I cofounded a company called DeepMind with two friends, Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg, in the summer of 2010. Our goal, one that still feels as ambitious and crazy and hopeful as it did back then, was to replicate the very …

VC investor Marc Andreessen once lamented the ambiguity surrounding platforms, writing, “Whenever anyone uses the word ‘platform,’ ask ‘can it be programmed?’ … If not, it’s not a platform, and you can safely ignore whoever’s talking.” Andreessen’s desire to align on a singular, shared definition of the term is understandable. …

Recently, a close friend told me how much he wanted to be a parent one day. I asked if he’d consider adopting. Suddenly, he became hesitant—pausing before admitting that he’d like to have children who were biologically related. His answer wasn’t unusual; in fact, it was probably my question that …

A few years ago, I was sitting with my friends from high school one night when the topic of our tracked screen time came up. Unlike me, they both have full-time jobs that have nothing to do with the internet. They barely use social media and have never once tweeted. …

In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg told the audience at a TechCrunch awards ceremony that young people—especially social media users—no longer cared about privacy. “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people,” he said. “That social norm is just something …