THE ATLANTIC – Technology | Internet & Technology

Last year, Steve Yegge started “suddenly getting pounded by nap attacks in the middle of the day.” Without fail, Yegge—a programmer and tech blogger—would “hit a wall, fall over, and sleep for 90 minutes,” he told me. Like many developers, Yegge no longer writes code by hand; instead, he manages a legion of bots to do that for him. His productivity has skyrocketed, but so too has his exhaustion. “I’ve fallen asleep slower at the anesthesiologist,” he recently wrote on his blog.In theory, handing tasks off to coding agents should free up time, allowing larger blocks for deep work and rest. But some developers are having the opposite experience. Instead of allowing for greater focus, the latest AI tools are overwhelming workers, frazzling minds and shredding attention spans. Although agents can do plenty more work now than they could a year ago, they still need human oversight. Like toddlers, AI agents ask endless follow-up questions, require detailed instructions—and, if you leave them unsupervised, are liable to make a huge mess. Once you get several running simultaneously, there’s no time for breaks. As Yegge puts it on LinkedIn, his job is to be an “AI babysitter.”[Read: AI agents are taking America by storm]Plenty of people are seemingly starting to feel like depleted AI babysitters. When Boston Consulting Group recently surveyed roughly 1,500 workers across several roles at major American companies, the firm found that many workers were experiencing “mental fatigue from excessive use or oversight of AI tools beyond one’s cognitive capacity.” Respondents described a “buzzing” and “fog”-like feeling, sometimes accompanied by headaches, slower decision making, and trouble focusing. One engineering manager told the researchers that managing multiple bots at once was like having “a dozen browser tabs open in my head, all fighting for attention.” In the survey, 18 percent of developers reported AI-induced exhaustion. But in other roles, too, such as HR and marketing, where AI is also taking over, rates of reported fatigue were even higher.In my own experiments with AI agents, I’ve experienced some of this brain fog myself. To get in the mindset of an overstimulated developer while working on this story, I asked Claude Code to deploy a team of agents to supplement my research. I already had done my reporting, but I figured the bot might be able to surface more information. Claude Code spun up a team of 17 researchers. It assigned eight… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Every World Cup propels a breakout star into the firmament; this year’s might just be a seemingly random German soccer fan who goes by Freddy. In the World Cup’s opening week, his X posts extolling a Taco Bell as “the holy land” and chronicling his rapturous 1 a.m. visits to a Waffle House and a Buc-ee’s have attracted more attention—from Americans, at least—than most of the actual matches.Freddy from Germany is the standard-bearer of an emergent social-media genre: A World Cup visitor from overseas encounters American culture and excess—and loves it. The Spanish soccer wunderkind Lamine Yamal loaded up a grocery cart at a Walmart in Georgia. “Why did no one tell me ranch sauce is like crack?” a Swedish fan posted on X from an Indiana diner. “EUROPE WE NEED RANCH ASAP.” A Japanese man raved about Texas Roadhouse steak. Freddy’s Buc-ee’s post showed customers flowing into the cavernous convenience store, its cartoon-beaver logo a towering beacon that illuminated the night sky. In another photo, a row of pumps stretched, like a horizon, beyond both sides of the frame. Freddy was overawed: “DUDE LMAO THIS IS A GAS STATION😭😭😭,” he wrote.Americans, of course, are eating it up with a spork. “This is genuinely making me patriotic,” one wrote of a video showing a rotund New Jersey–deli guy dancing with a visitor from London and giving him a chicken-parm sandwich on the house. Another observed: “It’s sick to see how many Europeans came over here to actually enjoy US culture. Saw a guy look at a Buc-ee’s gas station the same way I’d look at Stonehenge.” The caption on a video of an Italian’s astonished reaction to unlimited soda refills captured the half-winking exceptionalism in a familiar meme: “The European mind cannot comprehend this.”The videos have been covered in the media as a refreshing antidote to our polarized political moment and as an indication that American greatness resides at least partly in conveniences we take for granted. It’s a nice thought. But not all of the videos, or the people behind them, are quite what they seem.Take the Swedish soccer fan who swooned over ranch dressing. Elsa Thora, a photogenic 24-year-old blonde, has been featured in a number of news stories about foreign soccer fans’ American exploits, exuding a gee-whiz gusto for the country’s food and culture. “I feel like I’m in a movie,” she posted, holding bags of Hostess… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Every knowledge-based profession may one day reach the point when AI outperforms the human experts. In medicine, that day appeared to come in April. A group of primarily Harvard and Stanford researchers announced the results of a study that pitted ChatGPT against hundreds of physicians in a diagnostic obstacle course involving written medical mysteries and information from real-world patients. The bot had won, and the humans weren’t entirely happy about it.“I get a little bit queasy about how some of these results might be used,” Adam Rodman, a lead author on the study, said at a press conference just ahead of its publication in the journal Science. The work had amounted to an academic exercise, he told reporters; as thorough as it may have been, it did not prove that ChatGPT or any other AI tool was ready to become a standard part of medical practice. His caution was in line with that of other experts, yet as Rodman knew, most people will ignore the warning. AI has already wormed its way into the U.S. health-care system, evidence and safeguards be damned.Even as I was watching Rodman’s press conference, I got a message on my phone from the administrators at the medical center where I work as a pathologist. They’d emailed me to say that an “AI-powered clinical reasoning tool” was now available for me to use. This wasn’t the first time I’d gotten this sort of email; it wasn’t the second or third time either. In fact, I’ve lost count of how many generative-AI products have been rolled out to us in recent years, none of which has been approved for medical use by the FDA.This enthusiasm feels unprecedented. Health care is typically among the last fields to adopt a new technology; I still use a pager, and I send faxes on a regular basis. (Younger readers can ask Claude to explain what these things are.) A tendency toward simple tech is in part a product of doctors’ safety-focused culture: We know that any ill-timed glitch has the potential to turn deadly. But these days, clinicians are allowed—encouraged, even—to run wild with the latest software, guided by a generic warning that “AI can make mistakes.”Those mistakes can be consequential. Although Rodman’s research shows that generative AI can help diagnose rare diseases or make sense of unusual symptoms, a randomized trial that was published in NEJM AI just the week… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Late last month, I began to consider withdrawing some money from my savings account to buy gold. It’s the first time I’ve ever thought about panic-buying. For all of the firewalls and two-factor-authentication codes, the safety of the internet is starting to falter. Hackers are gaining the upper hand over organizations around the world—hospitals, energy grids, government agencies, and, yes, banks.As AI tools have become extremely good at writing code, they’ve also become extremely good at pulling off cyberattacks. (Malware, after all, is still software.) The result has been a change in the scale, speed, and sophistication of hacks that is difficult to overstate: Among its tens of thousands of clients, the cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks identified a fourfold increase in daily attacks from 2024 to 2025. Hackers are developing AI-enhanced computer viruses that adapt on the fly to avoid detection. They are automating cyber-espionage campaigns on foreign governments. They are stealing data in minutes instead of hours. “There’s a crazy amount of offensive activity happening right now,” Alex Stamos, a former chief security officer of Yahoo and Facebook, told me. “Companies are getting hacked every single day.”If the NSA is perturbed by the rise in cyberattacks, which it apparently is, then surely my savings are vulnerable. There could be any number of weaknesses in my bank’s IT systems to directly hack. Or perhaps an AI-written phishing email targeted at an employee, personalized to sound like a family member or manager, could let hackers into the back end to empty my coffers. Even if the bank has great cybersecurity, an attack on another business—a medical clinic I visited, a car-rental company, a newsletter subscription—could steal my payment information and, potentially, much more. The attack angles are seemingly infinite. And no one is adequately prepared.The term software engineering has always been an insult to the level of rigor demanded of mechanical, civic, and other engineers. Computer programs can be riddled with vulnerabilities and run just fine for years or decades—and much of the software underlying the web has done just that. “We’ve just been writing software in a totally slapdash and insecure way for decades now,” Stamos, who is now the chief security officer at the AI-coding company Corridor, said. With some small, high-stakes exceptions—such as software used on the International Space Station or nuclear submarines—code is written and deployed without much rigorous testing. If a bug is reported, it… [TheTopNews] Read More.

In theory, Donald Trump has a consistent position on AI. On the first full day of his second term, the president declared that he would use his full authority to speed the AI industry along and, in particular, to beat China in the AI race: “We have an emergency,” he said. “We have to get this stuff built.” If AI is poised to become the most important technology ever made, the thinking goes, whichever country commands the most powerful bots will dominate the rest of the century and beyond. The government, it seemed, would just get out of Silicon Valley’s way.But in practice, the Trump administration’s approach to AI has been much more erratic and confusing. Take last week, when Anthropic released its most advanced AI system yet. Called Fable 5, the model is an updated and public version of Claude Mythos Preview, the highly touted and feared AI model that Anthropic announced in April. Anthropic stated that Mythos Preview was so capable at hacking that only a small group of cybersecurity partners would be allowed to use it. In the subsequent months, the company developed guardrails to prevent people from misusing its most powerful AI for cyberattacks, while still allowing them to marshal its capabilities for other sorts of work. The safety measures underwent third-party testing, including with the U.S. government, and after Fable’s release, a chorus of cybersecurity experts complained that, if anything, the model was too restrictive.On Friday, the White House appeared to change its stance. Administration officials deemed Fable 5 a threat to national security and reportedly gave Anthropic 90 minutes to take down Fable 5 and Mythos 5, a newer version of Mythos Preview released to only a small number of organizations. When Anthropic did not, the government issued an export control, a designation that prevents any foreign national from using Fable and Mythos—even those employed by Anthropic within the United States. To rapidly comply, Anthropic shut down the bots for all of its customers. American companies and the U.S. government itself cannot use what’s perhaps the most powerful AI in the world—and the reasons are hazy at best.It’s not unreasonable for the federal government to want to rapidly clamp down on a technology that could be incredibly dangerous. Trump officials had been alerted by researchers at Amazon to a possible way to circumvent Fable 5’s safety systems, which led the model to identify some… [TheTopNews] Read More.