THE ATLANTIC – Technology | Internet & Technology

This particularly cursed holiday week kicked off in earnest last night when my father turned his iPad in my direction. On its screen was a terribly disturbing post on X containing two images. In the first, Jeffrey Epstein was hugging and kissing a little girl. In the second, that girl was bound and gagged on a bed.Dad was rightly outraged and disgusted. He asked me if I’d seen the photos in my time going through the Epstein files. I immediately recognized the first image of Epstein and deduced that it had been Photoshopped from a widely distributed photo of Epstein hugging Ghislaine Maxwell. The second image seemed to be an AI rendering. (To add to the confusion, images reportedly do exist of Epstein cuddling children.) I let him know that the imagery was fake, and a distinctly non-yuletidy conversation ensued. Yes, Epstein was a heinous pedophile and convicted sex trafficker.… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

A friend of mine had just traveled across the country to see his family when he texted me, deeply concerned. The chaos of holiday travel is always a drag, but usually, it was offset by getting a break and watching his kids spend quality time with their grandparents. But this year was different, he said: “They were just absorbed in their phones a lot of the time, and distant.” He wasn’t talking about the kids, but the grandparents.I’ve heard similar anecdotes in recent years—adult children worried about their parents slipping into screen addiction as they age. Stories like this pervade the internet. (One representative thread from the Millennials Subreddit: “Are all of our parents addicted to their phones?”) These accounts are striking in part because they mirror the concerns parents have been expressing for years about their children—that young minds are being influenced and warped by devices designed to seize… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

When I rode the escalator into the lobby of the Phoenix Convention Center on Thursday, one of the first things I saw was a two-story-tall picture of Charlie Kirk with his arm reaching out to the sky. The late co-founder of Turning Point USA was an inescapable presence at AmericaFest, the organization’s annual gathering. In the VIP area, a large screen played clips of Kirk on repeat. I watched people line up to get their picture taken next to a portrait of Kirk underneath a tent that read Prove Me Wrong on the front. It was a replica of the structure that Kirk toured the country with—and that he was sitting under when he was assassinated, in September.AmericaFest has long been one of the biggest events on the right, but this year, the conference saw a record turnout of roughly 30,000. When I asked attendees why they had decided to… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Waymo’s self-driving robotaxis can successfully nail a tricky left turn, weave through lanes to drop you off at the airport, and safely pass a U-Haul that’s idling in the middle of the street. But during a blackout, they apparently turn into four-wheel bricks.On Saturday, when a major power outage in San Francisco knocked out traffic signals, many Waymo vehicles didn’t pull over to the side of the road or seek out a parking space. Nor did they treat intersections as four-way stops, as a human would have. Instead, they just … sat there with their hazard lights on, like a student driver freezing up before their big parallel-parking test. Several Waymo vehicles got stuck in the middle of a busy intersection, causing a traffic jam. Another robotaxi blocked a city bus. The company suspended its service for several hours.Waymo vehicles should be able to call up a human agent for… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

There’s a scene near the start of Avatar: Fire and Ash that sums up the premise of the franchise, and its approach to making movies: Jake Sully, a colonialist Marine reborn as a blue-skinned freedom fighter, is trying to persuade his wife (also an alien) to accept the human weapons he’s found at the bottom of the ocean. As a proud Pandoran, she won’t touch the cursed technologies of the “sky people.” So instead he starts to strap grenades onto her wooden arrows, Rambo-style. This can be their compromise, he says: the traditions that she loves, but optimized for kicking ass.Over the past decade and a half, James Cameron’s three Avatar movies, all shot in three dimensions (and the latter two at a high frame rate), have meted out an argument for going big in film—for strapping on the most explosive new technologies in cinema and using them to blow… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.