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In November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT to the world. Soon after, a software developer asked it to provide instructions for removing a peanut-butter sandwich from a VCR, and to write these instructions in the style of the King James Bible. ChatGPT complied: “And the Lord said, ‘Verily I say unto thee, seek not to put thy peanut butter sandwiches in thy VCR, for it is not a suitable place for such things.’”
Many of us read these results with wonder and amazement and then went about our business. Ayad Akhtar, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author and playwright, started thinking about a new play.
The extraordinary work that resulted from his labors, McNeal, which just completed its inaugural run in a Broadway production at Lincoln Center Theater, is a juggernaut—an intellectual, conceptual, and dramatic juggernaut. It asks some of the most essential and urgent questions of our time, and it does so in a way that brilliantly fits form to function—a crystal-lattice form for its groundbreaking (cloudbreaking?) function. The phrase “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” comes to mind, except in this case, you could describe McNeal as “a literary lion in the mold of Philip Roth plus Pirandello’s ‘Six Characters in Search of an Author’ wrapped in the neural networks of a large language model inside a prism produced by nonhuman artificial intelligence.”
Akhtar took on no less a subject than the oncoming bullet train of AI, a creation that threatens to overtake and transform the intellectual foundations of our lives and redefine what it means to be human.
As the play opens, we meet a writer—Jacob McNeal—at the pinnacle of his powers, who begins to experiment, Prometheus-like, with the fire of AI. He uploads numerous classical and contemporary writers—Sophocles, Shakespeare, Flaubert, Ibsen—as well as portions of his late wife’s journals and the Bible, and prompts the chatbot to rework these texts in the style of … Jacob McNeal.
From the moment I watched Robert Downey Jr. type in these prompts, I was both riveted and riven. Riveted to see what would happen when human creativity meets AI, and riven because I am one of those people who is torn by what the technology ethicist Tristan Harris called “human downgrading” and who is rooting for the triumph of the irreducibly human.
Read the rest of this article at: The Atlantic
The first Yeti coolers arrived in America in the spring of 2008. They had spent weeks at sea, traveling from a factory in the Philippines to a leased warehouse in the hills south of Austin, Texas. Molded from a single piece of plastic, the coolers were porcelain white, with two black latches that gave them the rugged, field-ready look of an old Willys Jeep.
The 65-quart model of the cooler, the Yeti Tundra, was three times sturdier than lesser brands, and retailed for around $300. If you put a block of ice in one on a Monday, the payload would still be cold that Friday. Stout enough to withstand the prying jaws of a grizzly bear, the Tundra also looked right at home in your backyard on game day, a couple dozen Lone Star beers up to their necks in slush. It was perhaps the greatest ice box in the history of humankind.
Demand for the Tundra quickly exceeded expectations. Before long, a shipping container’s worth of the coolers was arriving from the Philippines every week.
Two years had passed since Roy and Ryan Seiders (pronounced SEE-ders) launched Yeti out of their father’s backyard, just a few miles down the road from the warehouse. Roy, 31 and fresh out of business school, was the company’s pioneer with a passion for product development. Ryan, three years older, was the outdoorsman of the family. Scruffy and charming, he made the rounds at hunting and fishing shows, and lent Yeti its backwoods authenticity.
But the Seiders brothers didn’t create the Tundra alone. They borrowed design tricks and styling from the best coolers on the market. And they brought it all together with the help of a collaborator who seldom makes an appearance in the company’s legend — Ivan Royal Brown, a gifted Australian designer who produced the Yetis at his Outback Five Star factory in the Philippines. During those early months of 2008, Roy and Ivan spoke daily, working out the kinks in the new cooler and fine-tuning its manufacture on the fly.
One day that September, Roy emailed Ivan a question. When he didn’t receive an immediate response, he grew concerned. “It wasn’t like him,” Roy recalls. He eventually managed to get in touch with Ivan’s new wife, Gloria, who broke the shocking news: Ivan had been murdered, she said, shot four times while driving home from the factory.
Read the rest of this article at: Business Insider
Throughout American political history, two capable, qualified, experienced women have run for president on a major-party ticket. Both have lost to Donald Trump, perhaps the most famous misogynist ever to reach the highest office. But in 2024, what was even more alarming than in 2016 was how Trump’s campaign seemed to be promoting a version of the country in which men dominate public life, while women are mostly confined to the home, deprived of a voice, and neutralized as a threat to men’s status and ambitions.
This time around, I wasn’t hopeful. I didn’t let myself entertain any quixotic notions about what having a woman in the most powerful position in the world might mean for our status and sense of self. I simply wished for voters to reject the idea, pushed so fervently by those on Trump’s side, that women should be subservient incubators, passively raising the next generation of men who disdain them. This wish did not pan out. “Your body, my choice. Forever,” the white-supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes, who has dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, posted on X on Election Night. “Women threatening sex strikes like LMAO as if you have a say,” the right-wing troll Jon Miller wrote on the same site.
Read the rest of this article at: The Atlantic
It’s been decades since a titan of tech became a pop-culture icon. Steve Jobs stepped out on stage in his black turtleneck in 1998. Elon Musk set his sights on Mars in 2002. Mark Zuckerberg emerged from his Harvard dorm room in 2004.
And now, after years of stasis in Silicon Valley, we have Sam Altman.
The cofounder and CEO of the chatbot pioneer OpenAI stands at the center of what’s shaping up to be a trillion-dollar restructuring of the global economy. His image — boyishly earnest, chronically monotonic, carelessly coiffed — is a throwback to the low-charisma, high-intelligence nerd kings of Silicon Valley’s glory days. And as with his mythic-hero predecessors, people are hanging on his every word. In September, when Altman went on a podcast called “How I Write” and mentioned his love of pens from Uniball and Muji, his genius life hack ignited the internet. “OpenAI’s CEO only uses 2 types of pens to take notes,” Fortune reported — with a video of the podcast.
It’s easy to laugh at our desperation for crumbs of wisdom from Altman’s table. But the notability of Altman’s notetaking ability is a meaningful signifier. His ideas on productivity and entrepreneurship — not to mention everything from his take on science fiction to his choice of vitamins — have become salient not just to the worlds of tech and business, but to the broader culture. The new mayor-elect of San Francisco, for instance, put Altman on his transition team. And have you noticed that a lot of tech bros are starting to wear sweaters with the sleeves rolled up? A Jobsian singularity could be upon us.
But the attention to Altman’s pen preferences raises a larger question: What does his mindset ultimately mean for the rest of us? How will the way he thinks shape the world we live in?
To answer that question, I’ve spent weeks taking a Talmudic dive into the Gospel According to Sam Altman. I’ve pored over hundreds of thousands of words he’s uttered in blog posts, conference speeches, and classroom appearances. I’ve dipped into a decade’s worth of interviews he’s given — maybe 40 hours or so. I won’t claim to have taken anything more than a core sample of the vast Altmanomicon. But immersing myself in his public pronouncements has given me a new appreciation for what makes Altman tick. The innovative god-kings of the past were rule-breaking disruptors or destroyers of genres. The new guy, by contrast, represents the apotheosis of what his predecessors wrought. Distill the past three decades of tech culture and business practice into a super-soldier serum, inject it into the nearest scrawny, pale arm, and you get Sam Altman — Captain Silicon Valley, defender of the faith.
Let’s start with the vibes. Listening to Altman for hours on end, I came away thinking that he seems like a pretty nice guy. Unlike Jobs, who bestrode the stage at Apple events dropping one-more-things like a modern-day Prometheus, Altman doesn’t spew ego everywhere. In interviews, he comes across as confident but laid back. He often starts his sentences with “so,” his affect as flat as his native Midwest. He also has a Midwesterner’s amiability, somehow seeming to agree with the premise of almost any question, no matter how idiotic. When Joe Rogan asked Altman whether he thinks AI would one day be able, via brain chips, to edit human personalities to be less macho, Altman not only let it ride, he turned the interview around and started asking Rogan questions about himself.
Its employees are some of its most devoted congregants. “It is the best of the old internet, and it’s the best of old San Francisco, and neither one of those things really exist in large measures anymore,” says the Internet Archive’s director of library services, Chris Freeland, another longtime staffer, who loves cycling and favors black nail polish. “It’s a window into the late-’90s web ethos and late-’90s San Francisco culture—the crunchy side, before it got all tech bro. It’s utopian, it’s idealistic.”
Read the rest of this article at: Business Insider
Murder is in the air. Everywhere I turn, I see images of a robot killing machine. Then I remind myself where I actually am: in a library lecture room on a college campus in East Texas. The air is a little musty with the smell of old books, and a middle-aged woman with wavy gray-brown hair bows her head as she takes the podium. She might appear a kindly librarian or a cat lady (confirmed), but her mind is a capacious galaxy of starships, flying bipeds, and ancient witches. She is Martha Wells, creator of Murderbot.
Hearing a name like that, you’d be forgiven for running for your life. But the thing about Murderbot—the thing that makes it one of the most beloved, iconic characters in modern-day science fiction—is just that: It’s not what it seems. For all its hugeness and energy-weaponized body armor, Murderbot is a softie. It’s socially awkward and appreciates sarcasm. Not only does it detest murdering, it wants to save human lives, and often does (at least when it’s not binge-watching its favorite TV shows). “As a heartless killing machine,” as Murderbot puts it, “I was a terrible failure.”
The character made its debut in Wells’ 2017 novella, All Systems Red. Yes, a novella: not exactly a popular form at the time, but it flew off the shelves, shocking even Wells’ publisher. In short order, more stories and novellas appeared, and then a couple of full-length novels. Wells scooped up every major award in the genre: four Hugos, two Nebulas, and six Locuses. By the time she and I started talking this past spring, Apple TV+ had begun filming a television adaptation starring Alexander Skarsgård.
At conventions and book signings around the world, Wells draws legions of fans, but here in Texas only about 30 people are nestled in the warm, wood-paneled library, which today is crammed with Murderbot art and paraphernalia. Wells begins by reading a short story, told from the perspective of a scientist who helps Murderbot gain its freedom. After the reading, a woman in the audience tells Wells how impressed she is by the subtlety of the social and political issues in the Murderbot stories. “Was that intentional?” the woman asks. Martha responds politely, affirming that it was, before saying: “I don’t think it’s particularly subtle.” It’s a slave narrative, she says. What’s annoying is when people don’t see that.
What’s also annoying is when people who’ve just discovered Murderbot wonder if she can write anything else. Wells, who is 60 years old, has averaged almost a book a year for more than three decades, ranging from palace intrigues to excursions into distant worlds populated by shapeshifters. But until Murderbot, Wells tended to fly just under the radar. One reason for that, I suspect, is location. Far from the usual literary enclaves of New York or Los Angeles, Wells has lived for all this time in College Station—which is where the nearly 100-year-old library we’re at today resides. Housed on the campus of Texas A&M, her alma mater, the library contains one of the largest collections of science fiction and fantasy in the world.
Read the rest of this article at: Wired
