THE ATLANTIC – Technology | Internet & Technology

The human brain has evolved to learn from specific instructors. When a child hears a gentle spoken word or a soothing lullaby from another person, when their cry is responded to, their brain lights up. Nurturing interactions, or what child-development experts call “serve and return” exchanges, help shape and strengthen the 1 million new neural connections taking place in a child’s brain every single second. Every time a child cries or serves up a bid for attention and receives a caregiver’s response, that back-and-forth helps build the circuits underlying their communication, learning, and emotional well-being. No other input, not even Johann Pachelbel’s Canon in D performed by the Berlin Philharmonic, is capable of activating the neural circuitry the way human interaction does.Until now. Generative AI may be the first technology in history sophisticated enough to mimic the social interactions that build our brains. Research has demonstrated that infants as young as six months old respond physiologically to interactions with humanoid robots in ways that mirror their response to live humans; another, small-scale experimental study recently found that, after young children interacted with a chatbot, most of them for the first time, they asserted that the AI could perceive the world with humanlike senses and understand and learn as people do.This technology is already showing up in children’s lives. The talking plush robot that purports to be a child’s best friend is obviously driven by AI, but many parents may not realize that their Amazon Echo recently received a software update that converts the Alexa voice assistant into a full-blown chatbot, using the same fundamental tech that fuels ChatGPT; toddlers asking for information about animals or a joke or a bedtime story may quickly find themselves in the habit of engaging socially with a large language model.As a pediatric surgeon, researcher, and technologist who has spent decades studying how children’s brains develop, I am concerned about these technologies rolling out and being used by children in the home and at school before we have a full sense of their safety and what they do to young minds. And I am compelled to point out what we do know about human development: that human connection, in all of its imperfection, is foundational to brain development. It can’t be engineered or recovered later.When a disruption as significant as the AI revolution occurs, people might look for a comparison to make sense of the… [TheTopNews] Read More.

What does a roughly $100,000 BMW 7 Series buy you? With a few taps on the sedan’s massive touch screen, you can play Pac-Man while it parks itself. Last week, BMW added a new feature to its infotainment system: When drivers start up their car, they are greeted by the following message: “Surprise! Spider-Man just dropped on your BMW!”Click on the prompt, which appears in most BMWs made after 2020, and the touch screen is taken over by a commercial for Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the latest movie in the Marvel franchise. The video is accompanied by blinking lights inside the vehicle. Though drivers can choose to skip the ad, it persists as an app on their car’s display.Many BMW drivers have not been thrilled by this uninvited pitch for Peter Parker. “Stupid and annoying and totally unnecessary,” one user posted on a BMW Reddit forum. “Wtf am I getting an ad? How is that appropriate in a vehicle?” wrote another. In an email, Phil DiIanni, a BMW spokesperson,  told me that the ad is part of a broader partnership between BMW and Marvel, which has included placing a tricked-out Spider-Man-themed SUV on the red carpet during the movie premiere, last week. “The animation is available for a limited time and only visible to drivers who proactively initiate it on their vehicle’s touch screen,” he said.A few other carmakers, such as Stellantis, have attempted in-car advertising before in the United States, but not a luxury brand like BMW. Regardless of what you drive, your car might be next. That’s because—to use the automotive world’s favorite cliché—cars are becoming “smartphones on wheels.” No longer is your vehicle a static piece of machinery governed by physical switches and buttons. This comes with many benefits. The modern, digital car can get better over time by virtue of its software: Over-the-air updates deliver new features that weren’t available when you bought the vehicle.But with great connectivity comes great responsibility. When carmakers can beam code (and content) into our cars, they have more control over our time and money. The tech industry’s most grating strategies are invading the car.[Read: My car is becoming a brick]You might already be feeling one downside of smartphones on wheels: subscription fees. Though drivers have already spent decades paying for in-car communications systems, such as OnStar, monthly subscriptions have proliferated. My Tesla wants me to pay $10 a month for… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Last week, the internet raged as social-media posts and news articles accused AI companies of “destroying the world’s books”—including “millions of rare” ones—by chopping off their spines to scan them more easily, and discarding them afterward. One article said the news was “sparking concerns that the last remaining copies of out-of-print texts are being destroyed.” The investor and AI skeptic Michael Burry called the practice of sacrificing rare books “evil incarnate.” Even Elon Musk weighed in, posting that he had asked the engineers training xAI’s models to “preserve any rare books in a library and scan them the hard way.”The destruction of physical books in the process of training AI has been public knowledge for more than a year, but debate over the practice intensified after an article by 404 Media, which described a large number of orders coming to booksellers, suggested that rare books might be included, and named a book-database company called ISBNdb as the possible buyer.Lost in the outrage, however, are several unanswered questions. The 404 Media story said ISBNdb had advertised bulk buying of books for AI companies, but acknowledged that no evidence directly connects the company to the recent wave of purchases that booksellers have described. And although the story calls out rare-book sellers, it’s unclear how rare most of the books being bought actually are, or whether they’re of great value.Despite that, the conversation rapidly intensified into a panic. So what is actually going on? And who is actually responsible?[Read: ]Is This What Comes After AI Slop?Many of the specifics of this situation are obscured by hard-to-trace purchasing histories and the silence of AI companies and other potential buyers, so let’s lay out what we know. We know that at least one major AI company has used physical books to train their models. Documents unsealed earlier this year in a lawsuit against Anthropic reveal that in the spring of 2024, the AI giant bought millions of new and used books and destroyed them in order to scan the pages to train its AI models. Anthropic and other AI companies are likely keen on books published before the launch of ChatGPT, in 2022, which are all but guaranteed to be free of AI-generated text. Although AI-generated text is readable—if often unpleasant—to humans, it can be devastating to AI models: When trained on their own output, they can degrade significantly in quality in a phenomenon known… [TheTopNews] Read More.

On a recent Thursday night, I sat among other guests at a house party and listened intently to a PowerPoint presentation about radium. Lauren Pickens, a 25-year-old who lives in the Washington, D.C., area, stood at the front of the room and flipped through slides about the carcinogenic chemical: A century ago, radium was marketed as a miracle. Americans added it to everything—including food and cosmetics. Within years, some had died. “We’re smarter than that these days,” Pickens said, pivoting to raw milk and other questionable substances people are ingesting today. Everyone laughed.The presentation was part of the theme that night. The co-hosts—Pickens and her boyfriend, Luke Brandl—had sent detailed instructions to everyone: “Pick a historically bad decision, from either personal or public memory, and tell us about it in the form of an 8–10 minute presentation.” We’d then vote and crown a winner. One guest discussed the chaotic 1904 Olympic marathon (one runner ate rotten apples and took a nap during the race, yet still managed to place fourth); another rehashed her relationship with an ex in the form of a book report. The party was held at Brandl’s home, which doubles as a museum of sorts to the various parties the couple has hosted. Sticky notes from an “embracing your cringe” party hung on a wall, as did a poster of the 1978 film Starcrash, which people had watched at another themed party—“bad-movie night.”Pickens and Brandl are more ambitious than the average party planner, but their events lean into a common enthusiasm among young partygoers for niche, even absurd, themes. I’ve been collecting examples for weeks: “dress like your favorite Metro stop,” a murder mystery about tech billionaires on a private island, a farewell to Spirit Airlines (“bring the spirit and spirits”). In some circles, hyper-specific party themes are becoming a norm, sometimes a requirement. “Having a coherent theme is more of an expectation now than it was two years ago,” Alexa Jordan, a 25-year-old incoming law student, told me. She’s hosted a spelling-bee birthday party and a cul-de-sac 5K, which entailed running in a circle for more than 65 laps. She estimated that about eight out of every 10 parties she’s invited to now have a theme.In one sense, the appeal of a niche party is simple. Themes are fun, as people discovered long ago. (In 1897, New York City socialites held a costume ball that has… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Opposition to data centers may be the singular unifying issue in American politics. Seventy percent of Americans are against data-center construction in their communities. They worry about the environmental dracularity of these facilities, the electrical costs they may impose, and the imperiousness with which tech companies target struggling communities while drastically altering the landscape. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have spoken out against data centers; so have Steve Bannon and the right-wing podcaster Matt Walsh. About 75 data-center projects were blocked or delayed in the first three months of this year—roughly the same as were blocked or delayed in all of last year. Still, this is a fraction of the more than 1,500 projects in development. Those who seek to stop the spread have recently turned to statewide moratoriums. Fifteen states have introduced moratorium bills, but only two of those bills have made it through the legislature. Last month, New York became the first to ban the construction of “hyperscale” data centers (ones that use 50 megawatts of power or more). Maine was supposed to have beaten it. In April, the state passed LD 307, which would have banned new centers using 20 megawatts or more. The bill went to the office of Governor Janet Mills to be signed into law. And she vetoed it.Mills took no issue with the thrust of the bill, writing “a moratorium is appropriate.” She vetoed it for one reason only: It failed “to allow for a specific project in the Town of Jay.”Jay, Maine (population: 4,620; motto: “Proud of our past and working for our future!”), wants a data center. It had one in the works, and town officials lobbied the governor to preserve it. Mills listened. “We must consider the perspective of the Town of Jay,” she wrote.In May, I drove to Maine to consider the perspective of the Town of Jay. I wanted to understand why this town had fought for the very thing that so many others dread. What I found was a reminder that politics is local. Jay’s embrace of the data center had less to do with the power of rapacious tech companies or the future of AI than it did with the failure of a series of welds that sealed a 166-foot-tall pressure cooker at a half-century-old paper mill.There are two Maines. The first Maine is right there on the license plate: vacationland. Lighthouses, lobster bibs, the jagged coast,… [TheTopNews] Read More.