Recent Posts

Kids Are Going Back to School. So Is ChatGPT

Last winter, the unveiling of OpenAI’s alarmingly sophisticated chatbot sent educators into a tailspin. Generative AI, it was feared, would enable rampant cheating and plagiarism, and even make high school English obsolete. Universities debated updating plagiarism policies. Some school districts outright banned ChatGPT from their networks. Now, a new school …

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Maybe You Should Just Join a Commune

ON THIS WEEK’S episode of Have a Nice Future, Gideon Lichfield and Lauren Goode talk to Kristen Ghodsee, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life. Ghodsee outlines why the traditional nuclear family …

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A Controversial Right-to-Repair Car Law Makes a Surprising U-Turn

Who owns the data created by cars: their owners, or the companies that built them? In 2020, Massachusetts voters overwhelmingly approved a law that began to answer that question. It required automakers selling cars in the state to build an “open data platform” that would allow owners and independent repair …

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Facebook’s 2024 Election Policy May Hinge on a Cambodian Video

When insurrectionists stormed the US capitol on January 6, 2021, in support of former president Donald Trump, Meta had to confront the reality that world leaders—even those in democratic nations—might use its platform to call for violence against their own citizens and political rivals. The company had long kept a …

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A Brain Implant Helped Stroke Survivors Regain Movement

Stan Nicholas almost didn’t go through with getting a brain implant.  The Cleveland Clinic was seeking volunteers who had been disabled by stroke to undergo an experimental procedure meant to restore movement in their upper body. It would mean getting a thin wire placed in his cerebellum to electrically stimulate …

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