Last week, both Microsoft and Google gave demos of their new artificial intelligence–powered search assistants. Microsoft’s Bing Chat sits inside its Bing search engine and Edge web browser, while Google’s Bard chatbot will do its thing on the same page where Google’s standard search results appear.
… And so on, until the 36th person types “Good morning,” and the work day can begin. It’s nine in the morning, and Alexia D., a graphic designer, types the final “Good morning.” No one dares skip the greeting. Not Alexia, not anyone. If she does, the team leader will log her as absent, even if 10 minutes later she is on the screen with her work completed and a smile on her face, ready to review project updates.
In September 2021, the criminologist Betsy Stanko went into the Metropolitan police force to work out why they weren’t catching rapists. The previous year, less than 3% of rapes reported to the Met had resulted in charges being brought; in 2021, that percentage almost halved.
What is a newspaper? Though a few decades ago the answer might have been obvious, it’s no longer so easy to say. Newspapers have long been about more than just news; they appear less and less on paper and, despite their geographically inflected names, aren’t firmly rooted in any particular place. The New York Times is probably the first thing that comes to mind when you think of an old-fashioned extra-extra-hear-all-about-it newspaper, but it’s also the poster child for the medium’s metamorphosis.
When OpenAI launched ChatGPT, with zero fanfare, in late November 2022, the San Francisco–based artificial-intelligence company had few expectations. Certainly, nobody inside OpenAI was prepared for a viral mega-hit. The firm has been scrambling to catch up—and capitalize on its success—ever since.
Last week, in our new series, Moving To, we looked at the charming town of Versailles, just outside of the French capital. This week, we are looking at another beautiful town, only a short distance from Spain's exciting capital, Madrid. Just 70 km south of the capital, Toledo is known as the "City of Three Cultures" due to its rich history of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian influence. Using the high-speed train, you can go from Toledo to Madrid in just over an half hour.
For months in the spring of 1921, a women’s-only private dorm at the University of California, Berkeley was rocked by a crime wave. College Hall, located on the northeastern corner of campus, where Hearst Avenue began to climb into the hills, was home to 90 young, mostly affluent women—18- and 19-year-olds, whose possessions kept disappearing.
Neural networks have become shockingly good at generating natural-sounding text, on almost any subject. If I were a student, I’d be thrilled—let a chatbot write that five-page paper on Hamlet’s indecision!—but if I were a teacher I’d have mixed feelings. On the one hand, the quality of student essays is about to go through the roof. On the other, what’s the point of asking anyone to write anything anymore?
Getting started with exercise can be one of the most rewarding decisions you make for your health and well-being. Regular exercise has been shown to improve mood, increase energy levels, reduce the risk of chronic diseases, and promote longevity.
Allison is an actress. When we meet up for coffee — she has an almond-milk cortado — in midtown, something’s different about her, but I’m not sure what. She looks like an Instagram version of herself but in real life. It turns out she’s down about ten pounds and happy about it. “Somebody once told me I had a size-zero personality, and they assumed that I was thinner than I was,” she tells me. “We don’t talk about it, but everybody knows it. Thin is power.”
Why do so many people have an immediate, intuitive grasp of this highly abstract concept—“subjective age,” it’s called—when randomly presented with it? It’s bizarre, if you think about it. Certainly most of us don’t believe ourselves to be shorter or taller than we actually are. We don’t think of ourselves as having smaller ears or longer noses or curlier hair. Most of us also know where our bodies are in space, what physiologists call “proprioception.”
Everyone lives with a shared burden: Inevitably, each of us will die, and so will the people we love. It’s easy enough to ignore when you’re young or healthy, but anxious questions remain. When and how will it all end? And what will happen when I’m gone?
Microsoft is making a desperate play. Having spent billions on a search engine that no one uses, the company has sunk billions more into equipping it with the chatbot technology ChatGPT, on the theory that answering queries with automatically generated, falsehood-strewn paragraphs rather than links to webpages will be what finally persuades users to switch from Google Search.
In his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed some interesting tendencies in his fellow humans. In one now-famous anecdote, he described his secretary’s early interactions with his program ELIZA, a proto-chatbot he created in 1966. Following a set of rules meant to approximate patient-directed Rogererian psychotherapy, and following a simple script called DOCTOR, the program made quite an impression ...
Steven Soderbergh is the rare filmmaker who views a sequel as a chance to do something different. In a moviemaking era suffused with safe and predictable follow-ups, Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Twelve remains a sterling example of a strange, surprising left turn from its predecessor’s formula.