THE ATLANTIC – Technology | Internet & Technology

Because of time’s arrow, my daughter, who was once a toddler, is now a preteen. A new question thus arises: When should I let her get a smartphone? This problem isn’t new to me. I have two older kids, now in their 20s. Back in the day, I bought each of them an iPod Touch—essentially, a smartphone without the phone—when they were about her age, and then the full device at around the start of high school. But online life was different then. There was less pressure to be smartphone-connected all the time. Social media wasn’t yet as ubiquitous, or worrisome, as it is today. Now the stakes seem higher.Today smartphones are as widespread as the concerns about their effects on young people’s brains. Psychologists have written best-selling books about how bad phones are for kids, and many schools have banned their use. Despite all this, no one can dispute… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Bill Lowery, a sales executive, is confused when a workmate asks where he should take a date out for dinosaur. “You’re planning to take this girl out for dinosaur?” Lowery asks. “That’s right,” the colleague responds, totally nonchalant. Lowery presses him, agitated: “Wait a minute. You’re saying dinosaur? What is this, some sort of new-wave expression or something—saying dinosaur instead of lunch?” When Lowery returns home later in the day, his wife reports on their sick son while buttering a slice of bread. “He’s so pale and awfully congested—and he didn’t touch his dinosaur when I took it in to him.” The salesman loses it.This is the premise of “Wordplay,” an episode of the 1980s reboot of The Twilight Zone. As time progresses, people around Lowery begin speaking in an even more jumbled manner, using familiar words in unfamiliar ways. Eventually, Lowery resigns himself to relearning English from his son’s… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Earlier this fall, a team of security experts at the AI company Anthropic uncovered an elaborate cyber-espionage scheme. Hackers—strongly suspected by Anthropic to be working on behalf of the Chinese government—targeted government agencies and large corporations around the world. And it appears that they used Anthropic’s own AI product, Claude Code, to do most of the work.Anthropic published its report on the incident earlier this month. Jacob Klein, Anthropic’s head of threat intelligence, explained to me that the hackers took advantage of Claude’s “agentic” abilities—which enable the program to take an extended series of actions rather than focusing on one basic task. They were able to equip the bot with a number of external tools, such as password crackers, allowing Claude to analyze potential security vulnerabilities, write malicious code, harvest passwords, and exfiltrate data.Once Claude had its instructions, it was left to work on its own for hours; when its… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Over the weekend, Elon Musk’s X rolled out a feature that had the immediate result of sowing maximum chaos. The update, called “About This Account,” allows people to click on the profile of an X user and see such information as: which country the account was created in, where its user is currently based, and how many times the username has been changed. Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, said the feature was “an important first step to securing the integrity of the global town square.” Roughly four hours later, with the update in the wild, Bier sent another post: “I need a drink.”Almost immediately, “About This Account” stated that many prominent and prolific pro-MAGA accounts, which signaled that they were run by “patriotic” Americans, were based in countries such as Nigeria, Russia, India, and Thailand. @MAGANationX, an account with almost 400,000 followers and whose bio says it is a… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

We cannot say for sure if Elon Musk dialed up the flattery quotient on his chatbot, Grok, after the author Joyce Carol Oates publicly humiliated him this month. What we can say is that, yesterday, Grok did assert, in response to a question from an X user, that “Musk edges out” Jesus Christ, son of God, as a role model for society; the bot cited Musk’s “relentless innovation, risk-taking, and a commitment to preserving our species through space exploration and AI safeguards.”Musk triumphed in many such hypotheticals. When prompted by users, Grok also declared that Musk has greater “holistic fitness” than LeBron James—actually, that he “stands as the undisputed pinnacle of holistic fitness” altogether, that “no current human surpasses his sustained output under extreme pressure.” One user asked if Musk would be better than Jeffrey Epstein at running a private island, and Grok explained that “if Elon Musk ever tried… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.