All posts tagged: book excerpt

The Gamblers Behind One of Chess’s Weirdest Unsolved Cheating Mysteries Have Been Unmasked

The Gamblers Behind One of Chess’s Weirdest Unsolved Cheating Mysteries Have Been Unmasked

Published by skeptic

The modern era of cheating in chess began on a Thursday in July 1993, when a man with shoulder-length dreadlocks walked into the World Open tournament in Philadelphia and registered as John von Neumann. Both the hair and the name were phony. The real Von Neumann was a prominent mathematician and computer scientist who died in 1957. The fake Von Neumann had a suspicious buzzing bulge in his pocket, fought a grandmaster to a draw, then fled before anyone could work out who he was. A Boston Globe columnist called it “one of the strangest cheating episodes in chess history.” Chess.com recorded the “Von Neumann incident” as “the earliest known case of a potential computer cheater.” This was decades before chess pros started getting expelled from tournaments for using smartphones, and a lifetime before the recent buzzing anal beads scandal. (Google it, but not at work.) It was years ahead of Garry Kasparov’s defeat by IBM’s Deep Blue, in an era when humans still imagined themselves to be smarter than machines. The identity of the …

How the Vision Pro Rollout Inflamed Tensions at Apple

How the Vision Pro Rollout Inflamed Tensions at Apple

Published by skeptic

To roll out its new mixed-reality headset, the Vision Pro, Apple devised a plan almost as intricate as the device itself. In January 2024, Apple summoned hundreds of retail employees to its campus in Cupertino to train them on the Vision Pro’s features. The company asked them to sign nondisclosure agreements swearing them to secrecy about the device, and even about where in Cupertino the training occurred. While on Apple’s campus, they were required to place their phones in GPS-blocking Faraday bags. Employees who had completed a day or two of the training were not allowed to describe the experience to other retail employees who were about to receive their first demo, so as not to step on the novelty. It all heightened the romance when the workers finally tried out the headset. Corporate officials showed off the way the device could transport them to an assortment of landscapes, seascapes, and moonscapes, or re-create the sensation of watching movies on a big screen. “Coming back from Cupertino, it was genuinely the coolest fucking thing I’ve …

Your Body Is Betraying Your Right to Privacy

Your Body Is Betraying Your Right to Privacy

Published by skeptic

Know thyself. It’s an old adage that has new resonance in the digital age. Today, you can buy smart devices that monitor your heartbeat, blood pressure, exercise habits, water intake, sleep, mood, menstrual cycle, sexual activity, and meditation patterns, not to mention your poop. The internet of things has turned into what academic and author Andrea Matwyshyn has termed the “Internet of Bodies” with the promise of selling you insights about your “quantified self.” The desire for self-awareness is not new, but these data offer a dif­ferent twist on enlightenment. Millions of Americans live with a smartwatch that reminds them to stand, breathe, and take a few more steps to meet their daily exercise goals. This helpful (and healthful) algorithmic prompt only works, of course, because your smart device is tracking your bodily activity. It literally knows you are breathing, which can be helpful to police if for some reason you stop. The data we produce—from our step count to our DNA—is increasingly coming under surveillance. Not all of this surveillance is unwelcome. Many medical …

Meet the Gods of AI Warfare

Meet the Gods of AI Warfare

Published by skeptic

Nearly a year later, on a hot day in the high summer of 2025, I stepped into NGA’s headquarters at the Fort Belvoir Army Base in northern Virginia. It was my second visit to the spy agency HQ, and I wanted to find out why Whitworth had changed his mind, how much Maven had spread, and how Maven’s new backers saw the risks and rewards of mainstreaming AI into military workflows. By then, Whitworth had become so ardent a fan of AI that his agency was pumping out machine-produced intelligence reports for US decisionmakers that “no human hands” had touched. And the NGA had launched a $708 million contract for data labeling in support of Maven’s computer vision models, the largest such appeal in US history, that would ultimately go not to self-made billionaire Alexandr Wang’s Scale AI but to Enabled Intelligence, a startup focused on hiring people on the autism spectrum expert in pattern recognition and comfortable with repetitive work. My visit required the rigmarole of any meeting at a spy agency. Courteous background …

The Untold Story of the Birth of the iPhone

The Untold Story of the Birth of the iPhone

Published by skeptic

The invention that turned Apple into a world-beating, billion-selling, society-changing colossus was not a laptop or a music player; it was the iPhone. It seemed to appear in 2007, fully formed, beautifully conceived, self-assured, and conceptually obvious. But behind the scenes, the iPhone we know today was made possible by more than bold bets, fanatical attention to detail, brilliant design, and a vision for the future; there were also false starts, last-minute redesigns, and a few strokes of luck. For starters, the product Apple set out to build first was not a phone. It was a tablet. Interdisciplinary teams at Apple are always experimenting with fledgling technologies. “There’s hundreds of little startups that are just poking around, doing stuff,” says sensors VP Myra Haggerty. “Sometimes someone’s like, ‘Hey, come look at what we’re working on!’ Then you go into some random lab somewhere, and they’re doing this really cool thing. ‘What could we do with this?’” Take, for example, Duncan Kerr’s projector demo. In 1999, Kerr, a British designer with a polymath design background—engineering, technology, …

AI Will Never Be Conscious

AI Will Never Be Conscious

Published by skeptic

The Blake Lemoine incident is remembered today as a high‑water mark of AI hype. It thrust the whole idea of conscious AI into public awareness for a news cycle or two, but it also launched a conversation, among both computer scientists and consciousness researchers, that has only intensified in the years since. While the tech community continues to publicly belittle the whole idea (and poor Lemoine), in private it has begun to take the possibility much more seriously. A conscious AI might lack a clear commercial rationale (how do you monetize the thing?) and create sticky moral dilemmas (how should we treat a machine capable of suffering?). Yet some AI engineers have come to think that the holy grail of artificial general intelligence—a machine that is not only supersmart but also endowed with a human level of understanding, creativity, and common sense—might require something like consciousness to attain. In the tech community, what had been an informal taboo surrounding conscious AI—as a prospect that the public would find creepy—suddenly began to crumble. The turning point …

How AI Companies Got Caught Up in US Military Efforts

How AI Companies Got Caught Up in US Military Efforts

Published by skeptic

At the start of 2024, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI were united against military use of their AI tools. But over the next 12 months, something changed. In January, OpenAI quietly rescinded its ban on using AI for “military and warfare” purposes, and soon after it was reported to be working on “a number of projects” with the Pentagon. In November, in the same week that Donald Trump was reelected US president, Meta announced that the United States and select allies would be able to employ Llama for defense uses. A few days later, Anthropic announced that it too would allow its models to be used by the military and that it was partnering with the defense firm Palantir. As the year ended, OpenAI announced its own partnership with the defense startup Anduril. Finally, in February 2025, Google revised its AI principles to allow for the development and use of weapons and technologies that might harm people. Over the course of a single year, worries about the existential risks of AGI had virtually disappeared, and …