Rough Transition

This story comes off reporting that I did for the most recent episode of The Last Invention, released this week. Please take our 3-second poll at the end, as it helps me bring you more stories you want to read. -G A MAD comic from the 1970s, discovered on my dad’s bookshelf, captured the space-age anxieties about technology in a strip about the coddled adventures of Future Man.

Venezuelans love their oil memes. Especially since the US invasion. edymar bravo on Instagram: "Dime la verdad😂" My friend Gabriela, an academic in Caracas, has been sending me memes. But I didn’t get the joke, not really, until I started talking to people there, and now I believe these jokes about oil are more nuanced than the news. At least, they’re speaking to something the news has missed.

This is a picture of wartime Ukraine And also this Nail salons are a thriving business in Ukraine since the Russian invasion. An artist I know in Kyiv who could not find work as an artist finally got a job at a very successful salon where people would come to get their nails done for two hours – full sets, layer on layer – and she was trying to get clients and she finally got a big break: three clients of her very own, booked for a day her boss would be out of town.

If you’ve ever wanted to peer inside the mind of someone who spends their day running a frontier AI lab building powerful new intelligent machines, someone who tinkers with AI models of such boundless capacity that the rest of us can’t imagine, someone who might, in a contemplative moment, ask their colleague “are we building a God?” and the colleague just shrugs… if you’ve ever wondered what such a person might think when they finish their workday and punch the clock and head out into the...

The view from the swimming pool stretched across the vineyards of a luxury Napa estate. Elon Musk was poolside, celebrating his forty-something birthday – forty-four, if you believe The New York Times; forty-two, if you trust his biographer, Walter Isaacson. Beside him lounged his then-friend Larry Page, and together they argued about the future.

How is it that the chatbot in my phone that relentlessly flatters me and seeks to be ever more helpful is also capable of blackmail and extortion? How do slavish obedience and betrayal go hand in hand? I recently re-watched Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey on a plane and I think that film is trying to figure that out. In retrospect, a movie about luxury space travel gone murderously awry was probably a poor choice to lull myself to sleep at 30,000 feet.

Standing in line for coffee in Geneva, I realized a robot was following me. This was the seventh robot I’d met that day, at a UN summit called AI for Good. Most of those other robots were quite chatty. Some cracked jokes, some offered hugs and therapy. This one was brightly colored and spoke only in musical beeps, like a cross between R2-D2 and a picnic cooler. It had been trained to follow its owner through a crowd. It did this by learning your unique kinesthetic signature: your step, your gait.

“A part of me was ashamed to have this reaction — Zelensky should have kept his mouth shut.” Painful as it was to watch Friday’s unprecedented shouting match in the Oval Office, it was even more unsettling to read - in the analysis that followed = so little from a Ukrainian point of view.

Stories from a changing world, from the host and creator of the NPR podcast Rough Translation. · Over 5,000 subscribers By subscribing, I agree to Substack’s Terms of Use and acknowledge its Information Collection Notice and Privacy Policy “Gregory Warner is a great journalist, writing a new chapter.” Steve Inskeep, Differ We Must “We are kindred spirits in creating space for stories with new and different perspectives from around the world!” Stranger's Guide, Stranger's Guide

I had this flashback this week - talking to friends in Ukraine and Goma and Kenya and Kabul about the impact of this USAID freeze — that I thought: this feels like 2008. Right now we look back in 2008 as this huge recession but at the time I remember it started with small signs. A friend in real estate mentioning houses sitting on the market longer than usual. Hiring freezes at mortgage companies. More moving trucks on the road. Then foreclosure signs on lawns.