THE ATLANTIC – Technology | Internet & Technology

On a fall afternoon 15 years ago, I met an idealistic researcher outside a Stanford coffee shop to discuss our shared dream: using AI to detect cancer. He had wiry hair, a penchant for talking with his hands, and a reputation for brilliance. He worked at a research lab that developed early screens for cancer; I, at 20, had just learned that I carried a mutation that conferred a very high risk of breast, ovarian, and other cancers. Over the following years, he offered guidance on how to enter his field, prepared me to apply for the scholarship that would fund my Ph.D., and warned me away from cancer-screening companies that made exaggerated claims.But from there our paths diverged. I became an AI professor. He co-founded Anthropic. My mentor was Dario Amodei, the man who leads one of the most powerful AI companies in the world. In a utopian 2024 essay titled “Machines of Loving Grace,” he predicted that superhuman AI—smarter than Nobel Prize winners, freely using computers, and collaborating with millions of copies of itself—could soon compress a century of scientific progress into a single decade, and potentially reduce cancer mortality by 95 percent.Which should sound pretty good to me. At 35, my cancer risks are catching up with me. A few weeks ago, surgeons removed my ovaries, instantly inducing menopause and destroying my ability to naturally bear children. By 40, the risk of breast cancer for carriers of my mutation rises to one in four, double the lifetime risk for the average woman. My mother, who also carries the mutation, was diagnosed with breast cancer at 45. Now would be a fabulous time in my life for a superintelligent AI to cure cancer.Why, then, do I find myself rooting for delays in the creation of this AI—hoping, in my heart of hearts, that GPT-6 will be a disappointment?Part of the answer is that, despite the extraordinary speed of AI development, I do not believe that AI is likely to cure cancer anytime soon—certainly not enough to bet my life on it. This skepticism is shared by most of the AI experts in a survey I recently advised, who generally expect slower progress than the leaders of AI labs. AI systems are strongest in settings such as chess, where they can generate infinite data (by playing over and over again), experiment freely, and observe exactly what happens. Many important… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Sylvia Meagher was 44 years old in the fall of 1965 and lived alone, except for her cat, Allegra, named after the ballet dancer Allegra Kent. She commuted from her one-bedroom apartment in the West Village to the United Nations, where she’d been working for nearly two decades at the World Health Organization. Although Meagher was a bureaucrat, her sensibilities were bohemian. She was acquainted with many of the painters, musicians, and writers who lived near her. In her foyer, Meagher displayed a painting of a nude figure given to her by a neighbor, the expressionist Alexander Dobkin. But the focal point of her living space was a bookcase laden with 26 reference volumes bound in dark-blue cloth. These were the supplemental materials of the Warren Commission Report. Only a few hundred private citizens in the United States purchased a copy of the 18,000-page, 54-pound series as soon as the Government Printing Office made it available. Far fewer had read it end to end. Perhaps only Meagher had nearly memorized it. Released in September 1964, the Warren Report was the government’s official story of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The report’s key finding was that an odd, angry, 24-year-old assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had acted alone, for reasons nobody could quite figure out. The public evidence—exhibits, hearings, et cetera—was piled into the supplementary volumes. The government did not furnish an index, making casual inquiry incredibly difficult.During the year since she’d received delivery of her crate of the volumes, Meagher had been reading and rereading. She’d remade her living room into an office, with filing cabinets for notes and correspondence, and a large desk positioned near the fireplace. She took a volume on the subway each day and made notes on a clipboard; she worked during her commute, during her lunch hour, at night when she got home, and every weekend. One of her friends, the French journalist Leo Sauvage, called her “the only person in the world who really knows every item hidden in the 26 volumes of Hearings and Exhibits.” Meagher was neither a conspiracy theorist nor a wannabe detective. She considered herself a “critic” of the Warren Report. A New Deal liberal with a far-left social circle, she had been subjected to questioning by a loyalty board during the Red Scare, putting her at odds with her government. When the president’s assassin was identified as a… [TheTopNews] Read More.

SpaceX had its initial public offering last week. Now Elon Musk is a trillionaire on paper. But what is SpaceX? On one level, of course, SpaceX is a company that builds rockets and spacecraft and launches them into space. (Occasionally the rockets explode.) It is also the company that birthed Starlink, a satellite-internet business that generated more than $11 billion in revenue last year.But the company can be defined in many ways. SpaceX is a financial instrument for Musk. Before the IPO, SpaceX acquired xAI, Musk’s artificial-intelligence company, which itself acquired X, the social-media site, back in 2025. The maneuver allowed SpaceX to claim that it believed it had “the largest actionable total addressable market in human history”: $28.5 trillion, to be precise. $26.5 trillion of that, according to the filing, would come from AI infrastructure and applications, meaning not from SpaceX’s core business of aerospace engineering and satellites.Maybe most important, SpaceX is a story, even a meme. Musk is arguably a better salesman than an inventor, and what he began selling early on was a techno-utopian dream—of himself as a Tony Stark–style genius, of an environment-saving EV revolution, of securing a future for humanity by getting us all to Mars. He intuitively understands the warped dynamics of the attention economy. Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian, the authors of the book Muskism, describe his strategy on social media as “trolling is infrastructure”: “Every joke, every poll is a stress test of responsiveness,” they argue. “Can he still move markets with a post?” Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency based on a 13-year-old meme of a shiba inu, is the shining example of Musk’s ability to lavish attention on something—in this case, a fake asset whose entire joke was that it was worthless—and make it worth more to others as a result.SpaceX is obviously not Dogecoin. Its rocket business is a genuine success story, as is Starlink. But the company’s appeal, particularly in the face of setbacks, is also reliant on a combination of story and Musk’s own image in ways that are not necessarily connected to reality. Musk has frequently set unrealistic timelines for projects, including putting a spacecraft on Mars by 2018. Last year, SpaceX’s flagship rocket underwent a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” on three test flights (it blew up). But SpaceX’s IPO filing was more oriented around its future ambitions and assumed triumphs, such as its desire to mine asteroids, promote space… [TheTopNews] Read More.

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.