Category: Backchannel
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I Am Laura Kipnis-Bot, and I Will Make Reading Sexy and Tragic Again
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Margaret Atwood, Marlon James, Lena Dunham, Roxane Gay: We’ve all agreed to be turned into AI reading companions by a mysterious company called Rebind. I report from the inside.
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The Secret to Living Past 120 Years Old? Nanobots
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In The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge With AI, the spiritual sequel to his (in)famous first book, Ray Kurzweil doubles down on the promise of immortality.
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If Ray Kurzweil Is Right (Again), You’ll Meet His Immortal Soul in the Cloud
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The famed futurist remains inhumanly optimistic about the world and his own fate—and thinks the singularity is minutes away.
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The Tech World’s Greatest Living Novelist, Robin Sloan, Goes Meta
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In which Robin Sloan writes Moonbound—a science fiction book about science fiction—and our writer writes his way into total insanity.
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How to Lead an Army of Digital Sleuths in the Age of AI
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Eliot Higgins and his 28,000 forensic foot soldiers at Bellingcat have kept a miraculous nose for truth—and a sharp sense of its limits—in Gaza, Ukraine, and everywhere else atrocities hide online.
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Indian Voters Are Being Bombarded With Millions of Deepfakes. Political Candidates Approve
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India’s elections are a glimpse of the AI-driven future of democracy. Politicians are using audio and video deepfakes of themselves to reach voters—who may have no idea they’ve been talking to a clone.
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Meet the Woman Who Showed President Biden ChatGPT—and Helped Set the Course for AI
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Arati Prabhakar has the ear of the US president and a massive mission: help manage AI, revive the semiconductor industry, and pull off a cancer moonshot.
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Elie Hassenfeld Q&A: ‘$5,000 to Save a Life Is a Bargain’
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Here’s Elie Hassenfeld, your high school EA crush. As effective altruism spirals into self-doubt, the idealist quant is still at it, helping Silicon Valley richies give away hundreds of millions each year.
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8 Google Employees Invented Modern AI. Here’s the Inside Story
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They met by chance, got hooked on an idea, and wrote the “Transformers” paper—the most consequential tech breakthrough in recent history.