existential

In 1914, on the eve of the First World War, HG Wells published a novel about the possibilities of an even greater conflagration. The World Set Free imagines, 30 years before the Manhattan Project, the creation of atomic weapons that allow “a man carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city”. Global war breaks out, leading to an atomic apocalypse. It takes the “establishment of a world government” to bring about peace.What concerned Wells was not simply the perils of a new…

Merry Christmas! We have made it – almost – through another year without being churned into paste by a super-intelligent AI, conscripted into a Martian work camp by an insane billionaire or forced offline by a Carrington event.Even in the absence of civilisation-altering events it’s been a busy year. But the advantage of a slow week (I hope that isn’t tempting fate) is that you can reflect on the past 12 months and realise that, sometimes, there’s only a few stories that really matter.Winter: the Guardian gets hit with a…

There’s a word in Spanish that the Chilean musician Francisca Straube frequently uses to describe herself: inquieta. It translates closest to “restless,” and it captures her creative spirit perfectly. For years, Straube was a drummer in several punk bands and indie acts, like the beloved outfit Miss Garrison. And then, around 2018, the itch came. “I think I’m restless both creatively and physically,” she says with a laugh. “I wanted to keep making songs, I wanted to play at libraries, I wanted to do shows at…

A s an alternate member of the Screen Actors Guild negotiating committee, Shaan Sharma spent most of this last year strategizing with other committee members and going back and forth with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers over deal points that are important to actors and their futures in the entertainment industry. As the issue of artificial intelligence is top of mind for performers, who have concerns about how the digital technology will shape Hollywood and impact their career…

 Google agreed to pay $8 billion over four years to Samsung Electronics Co. to make its search engine, voice assistant and Play Store the default on the company's mobile devices, according to testimony presented by Epic Games Inc. James Kolotouros, Vice President for Partnerships at Google, testified Monday under questioning by an Epic lawyer in the San Francisco trial that Google devised plans to share app store revenue with Android mobile device makers to ensure their products were preinstalled with Google Play on home…

Europe's hope to rival OpenAI, Aleph Alpha, may have just raised close to 500 million euros ($534 million) from investors this week, but its co-founder said Friday the start-up was in a battle to even survive.An alliance of investors, including the Lidl owner Schwarz group, Bosch, SAP and Hewlett Packard Enterprises, pumped 467 million euros into the German-based artificial intelligence company this week. Prior to the cash injection, the company of 60 employees founded in 2019 only had capital of 28 million euros. But…

Filmmakers have put monsters on screen for more than a century. In 2023, the real bogeyman looks just like us.Since June, Hollywood studios and performers have debated the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in film and television. Failure to agree on terms around AI was one reason why the SAG-AFTRA union representing actors and media professionals last Friday joined the writers guild in the first simultaneous strike in 63 years. Among the actors' greatest fears? Synthetic performers. While the two sides have negotiated…

Superintelligence is not required for AI to cause harm. That is already happening. AI is used to violate privacy, create and spread disinformation, compromise cyber-security and build biased decision-making systems. The prospect of military misuse of AI is imminent. Today’s AI systems help repressive regimes to carry out mass surveillance and to exert powerful forms of social control. Containing or reducing these contemporary harms is not only of immediate value, but is also the best bet for easing…

Filmmakers have put monsters on screen for more than a century. In 2023, the real bogeyman looks just like us.Since June, Hollywood studios and performers have debated the use of artificial intelligence in film and television. Failure to agree on terms around AI was one reason why the SAG-AFTRA union representing actors and media professionals last Friday joined the writers guild in the first simultaneous strike in 63 years. Among the actors' greatest fears? Synthetic performers.While the two sides have negotiated over…

With Oppenheimer nearing its release and keeping millions of fans curious about how one of the most notorious decisions and actions in history will be executed onscreen, people are snatching a moment to revisit Nolan’s complete oeuvre to try and draw similarities to his forthcoming work. In fact, in an interview with Hugo Décrypte, the filmmaker was specifically asked about the reasons for choosing to create movies with a similar tonality; namely, Nolan’s quintessential dramatic execution of existential crisis. And most…