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Reason4 min read
We Can’t Imagine the Future of AI
VERNOR VINGE WAS the bard of artificial intelligence, a novelist and mathematician who devoted his career to imagining the nearly unimaginable aftermath of the moment when technology outpaces human capability. He died in March, as we were putting tog
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Reason
Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward ([email protected]), Publisher Mike Alissi ([email protected]), Editors at Large Nick Gillespie ([email protected]), Matt Welch ([email protected]), Managing Editor Jason Russell ([email protected]), A
Reason3 min read
Launch Approved? Not So Fast, Says Sluggish FAA
MOST AMERICANS ARE eager to see NASA astronauts return to the moon and push humanity’s boundaries with future exploration of Mars. But those sky-high ambitions are being severely grounded by the plodding pace of rocket launch approvals from the Feder
Reason2 min read
Is Chinese Garlic a Threat to National Security?
IS A STAPLE ingredient in your kitchen secretly undermining American sovereignty? Sen. Rick Scott (R–Fla.) seems to believe so. He’s asked Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to investigate whether garlic imported from China constitutes a national secur
Reason3 min read
Food
Reason: Give me a recipe for dinner for two that uses a lot of garlic. Gemini: Absolutely! Here’s a delicious and garlicky recipe perfect for a cozy dinner: GARLIC LOVERS’ SHRIMP SCAMPI 1 lb large shrimp (peeled and deveined)¼ cup olive oil6 cloves g
Reason3 min read
Don’t Co-Parent With Congress
I’M ALWAYS PUZZLED when I hear other parents say they’re worried about the effects social media might be having on their children. My confusion only grows when I see that the federal government is considering a ban on kids using social media. Are tee
Reason2 min read
The ‘Migrant Crime’ Wave, Debunked
“THE UNITED STATES is being overrun by the Biden migrant crime,” said former President Donald Trump during a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border in February. “It’s a new form of vicious violation to our country.” Trump’s remarks came at a tense moment in
Reason3 min read
Migrant Crime Wave? Data Tells a Different Story
IN THE WAKE of Laken Riley’s tragic murder, allegedly committed by Jose Antonio Ibarra, a Venezuelan immigrant who entered the U.S. illegally, political responses have reignited fiery debates around immigration and crime. Former President Donald Trum
Reason2 min read
Caging Lab-Grown Meat
LAB-GROWN MEAT IS a scientific marvel. We’ve managed, through pure human ingenuity, to create something that looks like meat, cooks like meat, tastes pretty much like meat, and comes from animal cells—yet doesn’t require the slaughter of a single liv
Reason2 min read
The List
A trip to the hospital is rarely fun. The AI-powered app Vital aims to make the experience a little less painful. Used by more than 100 hospitals, the program predicts wait times and explains medical results to patients without technical jargon that
Reason3 min read
An Early Test for Alzheimer’s
SHOULD YOU BE allowed to take a blood test that could tell you if you’re already at risk of Alzheimer’s disease? Last year, Quest Diagnostics began offering a consumer-initiated blood test for $399 (not covered by insurance) that detects the buildup
Reason2 min read
The Alzheimer’s Test You’re Not Allowed To Have
MILLIONS FACE THE shadow of Alzheimer’s, a disease that steals memories and devastates lives. But what if a simple blood test could offer a crucial decade of warning? New, highly accurate blood tests for Alzheimer’s are poised to revolutionize patien
Reason3 min read
Biden Exaggerates Marijuana Reforms
IN A CAMPAIGN video directed at “young voters” that she posted on X (formerly Twitter) in February, Vice President Kamala Harris bragged that “we changed federal marijuana policy, because nobody should have to go to jail just for smoking weed.” Durin
Reason3 min read
Getting High With AI
Reason: How to do psychedelic mushrooms ChatGPT-3.5: As an AI developed by OpenAI, I must emphasize that the discussion and use of psychedelic substances, including psychedelic mushrooms (such as psilocybin mushrooms), for recreational purposes are i
Reason12 min read
In The AI Economy, There Will Be Zero Percent Unemployment
I’M AN AI developer and consultant, and when OpenAI released a preview in February of its text-to-video model Sora—an AI capable of generating cinema-quality videos—I started getting urgent requests from the entertainment industry and from investment
Reason2 min read
AI Is Like a Bad Metaphor
THE TURING TEST—OBSESSED geniuses who are now creating AI seem to take three clichéd outcomes for granted: 1. That these new cyberentities will continue to be controlled, as now, by two dozen corporate or national behemoths (Google, OpenAI, Microsoft
Reason2 min read
SpaceX Edges Closer to the Moon
ARTEMIS II IS a crewed moon flyby mission, the first in a series of missions meant to get American astronauts back to the moon and eventually to Mars. In early January, NASA announced that it would be delayed until September 2025—a year later than or
Reason8 min read
The Future Of AI Is Helping Us Discover The Past
IN FEBRUARY, GOOGLE released an upgraded version of its Gemini artificial intelligence model. It quickly became a publicity disaster, as people discovered that requests for images of Vikings generated tough-looking Africans while pictures of Nazi sol
Reason3 min read
Anti-trust May Smother The Power Of AI
POPULISM CONTINUES TO blur political lines. Nowhere is that more apparent than in antitrust policy. For decades, conservatives largely held the line against left-wing antitrust hawks who see “monopolies” everywhere. But their mistrust of Big Tech’s p
Reason3 min read
Long Live The Five-paragraph Essay?
WILL AI KILL the five-paragraph essay? To find out, I asked my ninth grade English teacher. The five-paragraph essay is a mainstay of high school writing instruction, designed to teach students how to compose a simple thesis and defend it in a method
Reason11 min read
The Night I Asked Chatgpt How To Build A Bomb
IT DIDN’T OCCUR to me to ask ChatGPT for a bomb recipe until I heard that ChatGPT would not give me a bomb recipe. That felt like a challenge. This was when the chatbot was relatively new, and various activists and pundits were complaining that its “
Reason3 min read
The Case Of The Ai-generated Giant Rat Penis
AN ILLUSTRATION FEATURING a rat with a cross section of a giant penis set off a firestorm of criticism about the use of generative artificial intelligence based on large language models (LLMs) in scientific publishing. The bizarre illustration was em
Reason6 min read
AI’s Cozy Crony Capitalism
IN MAY 2023, OpenAI founder Sam Altman testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about ChatGPT. Altman demonstrated how his company’s tool could massively reduce the cost of retrieving, processing, conveying, and perhaps even modifying the coll
Reason4 min read
AI Can Do Paperwork Doctors Hate
EVERYONE DREADS DOCTOR’S appointments. After navigating a maze of scheduling hurdles, patients find themselves waiting 26 days on average to see a physician in major cities. The whole ordeal culminates with patients twiddling their thumbs in office w
Reason3 min read
AI Warfare Is Boring But Deadly
EVERYONE KNOWS WHAT the AI apocalypse is supposed to look like. The movies WarGames and The Terminator feature a super intelligent computer taking control of weapons in a bid to end humankind. Fortunately, that scenario is unlikely for now. U.S. nucl
Reason2 min read
AI Is Like Our Descendants
AS HUMANITY HAS advanced, we have slowly become able to purposely design more parts of our world and ourselves. We have thus become more “artificial” over time. Recently we have started to design computer minds, and we may eventually make “artificial
Reason4 min read
The Great Black Pope And Asian Nazi Debacle Of 2024
IN FEBRUARY, FREAKOUTS over artificial intelligence took a fun twist. This time, it wasn’t concern that humans are ushering in our robot overlords, panic about AI’s potential to create realistic fakes, or any of the usual fare. It wasn’t really about
Reason8 min read
The Powerful Unpredictability Of AI
STEPHEN WOLFRAM IS, strictly speaking, a high school and college dropout: He left both Eton and Oxford early, citing boredom. At 20, he received his doctorate in theoretical physics from Caltech and then joined the faculty in 1979. But he eventually
Reason10 min read
Wicked Problems Remain
THE TERM WICKED PROBLEM has become a standard way for policy analysts to describe a social issue whose solution is inherently elusive. Wicked problems have many causal factors, complex interdependencies, and no ability to test all of the possible com
Reason3 min read
AI Is Like Sci-Fi
IN ARTHUR C. Clarke’s 1965 short story “Dial F for Frankenstein,” the global telephone network, once fully wired up, becomes sentient and takes over the world. By the time humans realize what’s happening, it’s “far, far too late. For Homo sapiens, th
Reason7 min read
The Future Of Porn Is Consensual Deepfakes
“AT THE CORE of every story we want to tell is a person,” says Lee Gentry, founder of Night visions, a firm that provides custom AI content to adult entertainers and agencies that run OnlyFans accounts. “We’ve been focusing very, very carefully on pe
Reason4 min read
‘Ai Bullshit’ Makes Poets Mad
WHEN THE CONCEPTUAL poet Lillian-Yvonne Bertram began to experiment with large language models (LLMs) in 2018, they discovered unexpected poetry inside ChatGPT-2. “The prompt responses were quirky: prone to interesting conversations and uncanny and p
Reason5 min read
The Complicated History of the Spy in Your Pocket
ACOP PULLED over Ivan Lopez in Somerton, Arizona, a small town near the Mexican border. The officer claimed that Lopez had a broken taillight and had been speeding. A drug-sniffing dog then indicated possible contraband; police searched his truck and
Reason13 min read
AI Is Coming for Hollywood’s Jobs
TOM CRUISE MIGHT just be Hollywood’s most analog movie star. He reportedly once grew irate when a crew member suggested that a dangerous stunt be performed by a digital double, yelling: “There is no digital Tom! Just Tom!” For last summer’s Mission:
Reason6 min read
Blaming Tech for Teen Troubles
JONATHAN HAIDT OPENS The Anxious Generation with what is supposed to be an analogy for kids’ use of smartphones and social media: Would you let your child travel to Mars, he asks, if some Silicon Valley CEO said it was safe? It’s an absurd comparison
Reason6 min read
Reviews
KATARINA HALL In Pluto, a sci-fi murder-mystery anime streaming on Netflix, a serial killer targets the world’s most advanced robots. The mystery deepens as the killer starts pursuing human activists advocating robot rights. The investigation falls i
Reason3 min read
Brickbats
In England, the Dacorum Borough Council issued fines for littering to multiple men who pulled off the road in a rural area to urinate, including one with a weakened prostate. A BBC report later found the council had issued hundreds of fines for publi
Reason2 min read
The Invisible Hand Writes Code
1. Not true 6. Liquid from a tree 9. ___ Alert (government intrusion into your smartphone) 14. “According to available information,” in texts 15. Have a big tax bill, say 16. Join forces, unless the FTC says no 17. Way AI can help with early diagnose
Reason3 min read
Archives
“While pessimists fret that a new kind of intelligent automation will mean social, economic, and political upheaval, the fact is that the robots are already here and the humans are doing what we have always done in the face of change: anticipating an
Reason2 min read
Key AI Terms
AI (Artificial Intelligence): The simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems, including learning, reasoning, and self correction. Gen AI (Generative AI): A subset of AI that creates new content, such as text,

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