THE ATLANTIC – Technology | Internet & Technology

To live in time is to wonder what will happen next. In every human society, there are people who obsess over the world’s patterns to predict the future. In antiquity, they told kings which stars would appear at nightfall. Today they build the quantitative models that nudge governments into opening spigots of capital. They pick winners on Wall Street. They estimate the likelihood of earthquakes for insurance companies. They tell commodities traders at hedge funds about the next month’s weather.For years, some elite forecasters have been competing against one another in tournaments where they answer questions about events that will happen—or not—in the coming months or years. The questions span diverse subject matter because they’re meant to measure general forecasting ability, not narrow expertise. Players may be asked whether a coup will occur in an unstable country, or to project the future deforestation rate in some part of the Amazon.… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

A couple of weeks ago, word began to spread around San Francisco that somebody was organizing a “March for Billionaires.” A mystery organizer had posted on social media that “billionaires get a bad rap,” and soon, some flyers appeared around the city. A website provided a time and rendezvous point; it also celebrated the societal contributions of Jeff Bezos and Taylor Swift, exhorting people to “judge individuals, not classes.” The message seemed to be: Not all billionaires.Initially, everybody I asked in the city was certain that this was satire, perhaps the workings of Sacha Baron Cohen or a stunt by union activists; after all, the website also lauds the value created by James Dyson, Roger Federer, and the CEO of Chobani (for having “popularized Greek yogurt”). I was reminded of how, several years ago, the faux-conspiracists of the Birds Aren’t Real movement rallied outside Twitter’s headquarters to critique dangerous social-media… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Illustrations by Stephan DybusIn 1869, a group of Massachusetts reformers persuaded the state to try a simple idea: counting.The Second Industrial Revolution was belching its way through New England, teaching mill and factory owners a lesson most M.B.A. students now learn in their first semester: that efficiency gains tend to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is usually somebody else. The new machines weren’t just spinning cotton or shaping steel. They were operating at speeds that the human body—an elegant piece of engineering designed over millions of years for entirely different purposes—simply wasn’t built to match. The owners knew this, just as they knew that there’s a limit to how much misery people are willing to tolerate before they start setting fire to things.Still, the machines pressed on.So Massachusetts created the nation’s first Bureau of Statistics of Labor, hoping that data might accomplish what conscience could not. By measuring work… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

In a state court in Los Angeles this week, 12 jurors are hearing opening arguments in a case that has the potential to change social media—maybe even the internet—as we know it.The trial, which began today, is a bellwether: Similar individual cases have been filed all around the country, and a massive federal case with more than 2,000 plaintiffs is expected to proceed this summer. In each case, the plaintiffs accuse social-media companies of releasing defective products. The argument is that these products were built with dangerously habit-forming features—including the endless-scroll feed, algorithmic recommendations, and push notifications—that have led to an array of serious health problems. Plaintiffs also accuse the companies of failing to warn users about the risks of using their products and of deliberately concealing their dangers.The L.A. case is the first to make it to trial. It is scheduled to last about six weeks, and it  focuses… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Donald Trump supercharged his political career by claiming that Barack Obama wasn’t American. Yesterday, 16 minutes before midnight, the president’s account on Truth Social posted a video that suggests Obama isn’t even human. It briefly shows the head of the first Black president and that of his wife superimposed onto the bodies of apes. They dance along to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”The video, which Trump’s account shared twice, seems to be a screen recording. Its first minute shows a clip promoting the lie that voting-machine tampering handed Joe Biden the presidency in 2020. Then, someone seems to swipe up, and the clip depicting the Obamas as apes flashes into focus.The clip is on the screen for only a moment before the recording returns to the voting-machine video. And just before noon today, both posts of the video were removed from the president’s Truth Social account. (When I asked why, a… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.