Technology

Since this topic is likely to get controversial I’ll preface with my own opinion that AI CEOs are lying scumbags who grow their pockets using fear of missing out… unfortunately most other people who get hooked are other CEOs and so everyone is affected.

I don’t think current AI is anywhere close to AGI and I don’t think throwing more money at the problem will get us there. But I do think it’s a worthy question to figure out how to integrate AGI into a society with minimal friction. And by minimal I mean avoid societal collapse.

Couple of definitions since they are often ambiguous. What I imagine AGI to be is a “human-in-a-box” level of intelligence but without any basic wants of its own. You can train it “you want to help me” and it will or you can train it “you want to wage war” and it will.

The main difference between AGI and modern LLMs is the ability to learn incrementally - LLMs get trained, released, and you talk to a library in a frozen state. True AGI will integrate everything said into its model, so once you tell it “don’t output em dashes”.. it will apply that to all future conversations.

Of course, if whoever invents the AGI has the mindset of tech companies CEOs they will just outcompete all intellectual labor from everyone. Eventually the economy will reach some steady-state where no one except the company has enough money… at which point I guess there will be some sort of adjustment.

On the other hand let’s assume whoever starts the AGI is not out to stuff their pockets. The path of integration is still complex and people will get hurt one way or the other. But what’s a way to minimize that hurt? My main worry, for example, is having open-source AGI and someone like a script kiddie going “find a vulnerability in X” and it does. If a single corporation does not control the AGI then I’m sure there will be 3 000 flavors of models that can do anything. Once the integration is complete then hopefully there won’t be too many vulnerabilities to find but until then the possibility space is big. Same pattern can be observed in virtually all other aspects of our society. How to minimize this?

Paulina Borsook saw there was something rotten afoot in Silicon Valley in the 1990s, and in her book Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech, she set out to document and understand a peculiar mindset she saw emerging. Originally published in 2000, Paulina’s observations in Cyberselfish have proved truer now than when it was first written. She saw that the culture of high tech was determinedly anti-government, even as it owed its growth to government subsidization. That tech prioritized the idea of progress and profits and ignored all costs. That it co-opted the language of evolution to make human decisions and power structures seem inevitable. That the industry was hyper-male and tended toward hyper-misogynistic. That its figureheads possessed great wealth but were abysmal at sharing that wealth through philanthropy.

Cyberselfish was published into a moment in which tech and its leaders’ reputations were immaculate and unquestioned. Now we know better. Thanks to a surge of interest in her prophetic insights, Cyberselfish will be reissued this fall to a world that’s finally ready to listen. The following is an excerpt from the new edition.

When we were hired by the United Electrical Workers to spearhead the union drive at Twitter, it seemed the tech industry might finally be bending to progressive pressure. It was early in 2022, a year after the historic Capitol attacks of January 6, which saw Donald Trump call on his nearly eighty-eight million Twitter followers in an attempt to overturn his electoral defeat to Joe Biden. More and more public outrage was being directed at the tools that had enabled the president to mobilize his supporters. And Twitter, after deleting a series of Trump’s incendiary posts, had taken the most extreme measure of all the major social media platforms by issuing a permanent ban on the sitting president’s account.

Many outside the industry attributed the decision to Silicon Valley’s then-progressive values—management taking a principled stand against an overt attack on democracy—but in reality, it was almost entirely worker-driven. Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s founder and then-CEO, initially hesitated to take action after the Capitol attack. He said to staff that the company was not “the government,” and it was the responsibility of elected officials—not a private platform—to “do the work to right this and bring the country together.” Twitter’s employees, feeling complicit in enabling Trump’s insurrection, pushed management for decisive action. Two days after the sitting president’s self-coup attempt, hundreds of workers delivered an open letter to their employer that demanded Trump’s permanent suspension. “As Trump’s megaphone,” the letter declared, “we helped fuel the deadly events of January 6th.” That internal revolt proved decisive. Twitter’s leadership caved and permanently removed Trump from the platform.

Emboldened by their success and fueled by a newfound sense of solidarity, the group of employees who penned the letter decided to launch a union drive to codify their collective leverage and ensure the platform would never enable events like January 6 again. They had helped safeguard democracy before. This time, they were determined to win it for themselves—and we, joining their drive as dedicated staff, were determined to help them. Clarissa had helped win one of the first tech unions at Kickstarter. JS, meanwhile, had organized graduate students at MIT. By bringing our experience as organizers to Twitter’s campaign, we hoped we could harness the nascent movement’s energy and steer it with some established labor tactics. We knew we were in for a challenge—but we could never have anticipated how quickly the tech elite would dig up the ground from underneath us.

OpenAI’s chatbot fed the school shooter’s violent fantasies and planning up to the massacre, our investigation reveals.

In June 2025, Jesse Van Rootselaar received an email notification from OpenAI. Van Rootselaar had been using ChatGPT to discuss committing potential acts of violence—including a mass shooting at a shopping mall—and now OpenAI had banned that account. But the troubled teen living in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, was not deterred and soon logged back on with a second account.

In case anybody doubted the corporation that was actively complicit.

https://archive.is/RWt8f

Some Samsung smart fridges stopped working on Tuesday due to a firmware update.

Korean outlets were the first to report the problems, which affect Samsung’s Bespoke AI line of fridges. Star News Korea, per a Google-provided translation, said that most of the affected devices were four-door fridges from 2024 or later.

Affected fridges “suddenly lost power and stopped functioning immediately after” trying to issue a firmware update through SmartThings, Samsung’s smart home platform, per Star News Korea. The SmartThings app then showed the devices as offline. Some users said that their fridge’s internal display was stuck showing the message “Checking SmartThings app during update.”

There are numerous reports on Samsung’s Korean community forum detailing the problem. Some users claim that they have owned their affected fridge for just a year or less.

“[T]he refrigeration and refrigeration functions themselves did not work normally, so all the food in the refrigerator had to be disposed of,” one user wrote, per a translation.

https://archive.is/96YBP

Infuriatingly for iOS users, the only way to disable these promos is to either let them expire — which in many cases could take weeks or even months, leaving a persistent notification badge on the Settings app in the meantime — or pay for the service being offered.

Infuriatingly for iOS users, the only way to disable these promos is to either let them expire — which in many cases could take weeks or even months, leaving a persistent notification badge on the Settings app in the meantime — or pay for the service being offered.

By Emily Bender and Timnit Gebru, timely and thoughful as ever:

Claims of incipient, dangerous superintelligence are not based in good scientific or engineering practice. Rather, they are narratives based in ideologies of transhumanism, eugenics, and wishful thinking about imagined future digital humans.

[…]

the illusion of speed and urgency promulgated by the tech companies is also a ploy to misdirect both policymakers and the public. Unfortunately, it sometimes works, such as with Senator Bernie Sanders’s well-meaning but ultimately misguided proposed legislation to prevent the development of “artificial superintelligence.”

Describing them as “superintelligence” or “rogue models” ascribes agency to products rather than to the companies building them. This framing markets these companies’ products as “superhuman” and, at the same time, helps the companies evade accountability for their actions.