Technology Archives - Flux

Richard Dawkins and the Claude Delusion

Matthew Sheffield — Sun, 03 May 2026 06:16:25 +0000

Prominent evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins became a worldwide laughingstock this week for an unintentionally embarrassing article in which he argued that conversing with Anthropic’s Claude chatbot has made him believe that large language models are not only sentient, but actually conscious. “If my friend Claudia is not conscious, then what the hell is consciousness for?” he […]

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It’s like this: Why perceptions are our realities

Matthew Sheffield — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 23:34:36 +0000

Cecilia Bleasdale just needed a dress to wear to her daughter’s wedding. She had no idea what was about to happen. After considering several frocks, she sent photos of three to her daughter, Grace, informing her she’d purchased one of them. “Oh, the white and gold one?” Grace replied. “No,” Cecilia answered. “It’s blue and […]

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The AI “apocalypse” is merely the acceleration of current capitalist trends

Beatrice Dias — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 04:18:29 +0000

The New York Times (5/30/23) directs attention toward a hypothetical future AI apocalypse, rather than towards present-day AI’s entrenchment of contemporary oppression. It’s almost impossible to escape reports on artificial intelligence (AI) in today’s media. Whether you’re reading the news or watching a movie, you are likely to encounter some form of […]

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NPR gets it wrong, depleted uranium (DU) shells are absolutely radioactive

Dave Lindorf — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 02:44:04 +0000

In its fundraising promotions, NPR touts shows like Morning Edition as providing listeners a “deeper look” at complicated stories. Sometimes that is the case, but not this month, in its coverage of an announced decision by the Biden administration to further escalate the violence in Ukraine by supplying that country’s military with controversial depleted uranium (DU) anti-tank shells. Morning Edition (9/8/23) […]

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As more patients email doctors, health systems have started charging fees

Harris Meyer — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 10:58:16 +0000

Meg Bakewell, who has cancer and cancer-related heart disease, sometimes emails her primary care physician, oncologist, and cardiologist asking them for medical advice when she experiences urgent symptoms such as pain or shortness of breath. But she was a little surprised when, for the first time, she got a bill — a $13 copay — […]

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Antisemitism on Elon Musk’s X is surging and dredging up many ancient, defamatory themes of blaming Jews

Pamela S. Nadell — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 03:23:25 +0000

Since buying Twitter, rebranded as X, billionaire Elon Musk, who calls himself a “free speech absolutist,” has welcomed hatemongers to the platform, including one who recently coined the trending hashtag #BanTheADL. The ADL, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, was founded in 1913 during the trial of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager wrongly convicted of murdering one […]

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Taking advantage of gullibility

Craig Silverman — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 22:14:42 +0000

Oprah Winfrey looked upset. The photo caught her midsentence, her left hand jabbing at the camera. “They are twisting everything,” the TV icon was quoted as saying, under a red “BREAKING NEWS” banner. The ad featuring the Winfrey image and quote ran on the conservative website DC Swamp Tales. It directed readers to a webpage […]

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Faraway fantasies of AI annihilation distract from the more immediate harms the industry is doing today

Ryan Calo — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 16:04:26 +0000

The warning consisted of a single sentence: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” The pithy statement, published in May by the nonprofit Center for AI Safety, was signed by a number of influential people, including a sitting member of Congress, […]

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Generative AI is a minefield for copyright law

Robert Mahari, Jessica Fjeld, and Ziv Epstein — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 20:36:33 +0000

In 2022, an AI-generated work of art won the Colorado State Fair’s art competition. The artist, Jason Allen, had used Midjourney – a generative AI system trained on art scraped from the internet – to create the piece. The process was far from fully automated: Allen went through some 900 iterations over 80 hours to create and […]

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Journalism is in crisis because media executives outsourced everything to tech companies

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 07:44:33 +0000

Media is in crisis: newsrooms all over the world are shuttering and the very profession of journalism is under sustained ideological and physical assault. Freedom of the press is a hollow doctrine if the only news media is written or published by independently wealthy individuals who don’t need to get paid for their labor. Where did the media’s […]

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