Lawsuits take a long time, and so there’s no good reason to believe that Google as we know it will be gone anytime soon. But as the antitrust fight against the company continues, and Google’s losses mount, it’s also starting to seem like Google as we know also won’t be around forever. In one case, the Play Store is being opened up; in another, the government says it might try to force Chrome and Android out of Google. On this episode of The Vergecast, The Verge’s Lauren Feiner takes us through all the latest movements in the many cases against Google, and what she’s hearing about how the government and the company are preparing for the future. But before we get to that, we do some wild Tesla speculating. Because you’ve now seen the...

The US defense research agency is funding three universities to engineer reef structures that will be colonized by corals and bivalves and absorb the power of future storms.

The robots were interacting with guests at Tesla's big Cybercab event Thursday in L.A.

It really has been something to watch Elon Musk turn SpaceX into the MyPillow of rocket companies, hasn’t it? Christ, I guess I have to list off all the depressing stuff from the past few months: the Trump rally, the creepy assassination comments, the even creepier comments about impregnating Taylor Swift, spreading hurricane misinformation on X (and thus hindering relief efforts), claiming his own child was “killed” by the “woke mind virus,” that kind of thing. I have seen a lot of people suggest this is political radicalization, and sure, maybe it is. But I can’t help noticing a sick business logic, too. I have never accused Musk of being anything other than...

AI companies are on a mission to radically change our world. They’re working on building machines that could outstrip human intelligence and unleash a dramatic economic transformation on us all.  Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, has basically told us he’s trying to build a god — or “magic intelligence in the sky,” as he puts it. OpenAI’s official term for this is artificial general intelligence, or AGI. Altman says that AGI will not only “break capitalism” but also that it’s “probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity.”  There’s a very natural question here: Did anyone actually ask for this kind of AI? By what right do a few powerful tech CEOs get to decide that our whole world should be turned upside down?  As I’ve written before, it’s clearly undemocratic that private companies are building tech that aims to totally change the world without seeking buy-in from the public. In fact, even leaders at the major companies are expressing unease about how undemocratic it is. Jack Clark, the co-founder of the AI company Anthropic, told Vox last year that it’s “a real weird thing that this is not a government project.” He also wrote that there are several key things he’s “confused and uneasy” about, including, “How much permission do AI developers need to get from society before irrevocably changing society?” Clark continued: Technologists have always had something of a libertarian streak, and this is perhaps best epitomized by the ‘social media’ and Uber et al era of the 2010s — vast, society-altering systems ranging from social networks to rideshare systems were deployed into the world and aggressively scaled with little regard to the societies they were influencing. This form of permissionless invention is basically the implicitly preferred form of development as epitomized by Silicon Valley and the general ‘move fast and break things’ philosophy of tech. Should the same be true of AI? I’ve noticed that when anyone questions that norm of “permissionless invention,” a lot of tech enthusiasts push back. Their objections always seem to fall into one of three categories. Because this is such a perennial and important debate, it’s worth tackling each of them in turn — and why I think they’re wrong.  ChatGPT is the fastest-growing consumer application in history: It had 100 million active users just two months after it launched. There’s no disputing that lots of people genuinely found it really cool. And it spurred the release of other chatbots, like Claude, which all sorts of people are getting use out of — from journalists to coders to busy parents who want someone (or something) else to make the goddamn grocery list. Some claim that this simple fact — we’re using the AI! — proves that people consent to what the major companies are doing.  This is a common claim, but I think it’s very misleading. Our use of an AI system is not tantamount to consent. By “consent” we typically mean informed consent, not consent born of ignorance or coercion.  Much of the public is not informed about the true costs and benefits of these systems. How many people are aware, for instance, that generative AI sucks up so much energy that companies like Google and Microsoft are reneging on their climate pledges as a result? Plus, we all live in choice environments that coerce us into using technologies we’d rather avoid. Sometimes we “consent” to tech because we fear we’ll be at a professional disadvantage if we don’t use it. Think about social media. I would personally not be on X (formerly known as Twitter) if not for the fact that it’s seen as important for my job as a journalist. In a recent survey, many young people said they wish social media platforms were never invented, but given that these platforms do exist, they feel pressure to be on them. Even if you think someone’s use of a particular AI system does constitute consent, that doesn’t mean they consent to the bigger project of building AGI.  This brings us to an important distinction: There’s narrow AI — a system that’s purpose-built for a specific task (say, language translation) — and then there’s AGI. Narrow AI can be fantastic! It’s helpful that AI systems can perform a crude copy edit of your work for free or let you write computer code using just plain English. It’s awesome that AI is helping scientists better understand disease. And it’s extremely awesome that AI cracked the protein-folding problem — the challenge of predicting which 3D shape a protein will fold into — a puzzle that stumped biologists for 50 years. The Nobel Committee for Chemistry clearly agrees: It just gave a Nobel prize to AI pioneers for enabling this breakthrough, which will help with drug discovery. But that is different from the attempt to build a general-purpose reasoning machine that outstrips humans, a “magic intelligence in the sky.” While plenty of people do want narrow AI, polling shows that most Americans do not want AGI. Which brings us to … Here’s a quote commonly (though dubiously) attributed to car-maker Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” The claim here is that there’s a good reason why genius inventors don’t ask for the public’s buy-in before releasing a new invention: Society is too ignorant or unimaginative to know what good innovation looks like. From the printing press and the telegraph to electricity and the internet, many of the great technological innovations in history happened because a few individuals decided on them by fiat. But that doesn’t mean deciding by fiat is always appropriate. The fact that society has often let inventors do that may be partly because of technological solutionism, partly because of a belief in the “great man” view of history, and partly because, well, it would have been pretty hard to consult broad swaths of society in an era before mass communications — before things like a printing press or a telegraph!  And while those inventions did come with perceived risks and real harms, they didn’t pose the threat of wiping out humanity altogether or making us subservient to a different species. For the few technologies we’ve invented so far that meet that bar, seeking democratic input and establishing mechanisms for global oversight have been attempted, and rightly so. It’s the reason we have a Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and a Biological Weapons Convention — treaties that, though it’s a struggle to implement them effectively, matter a lot for keeping our world safe. It’s true, of course, that most people don’t understand the nitty-gritty of AI. So, the argument here is not that the public should be dictating the minutiae of AI policy. It’s that it’s wrong to ignore the public’s general wishes when it comes to questions like “Should the government enforce safety standards before a catastrophe occurs or only punish companies after the fact?” and “Are there certain kinds of AI that shouldn’t exist at all?”.  As Daniel Colson, the executive director of the nonprofit AI Policy Institute, told me last year, “Policymakers shouldn’t take the specifics of how to solve these problems from voters or the contents of polls. The place where I think voters are the right people to ask, though, is: What do you want out of policy? And what direction do you want society to go in?” Finally, there’s the technological inevitability argument, which says that you can’t halt the march of technological progress — it’s unstoppable! This is a myth. In fact, there are lots of technologies that we’ve decided not to build, or that we’ve built but placed very tight restrictions on. Just think of human cloning or human germline modification. The recombinant DNA researchers behind the Asilomar Conference of 1975 famously organized a moratorium on certain experiments. We are, notably, still not cloning humans.   Or think of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. Adopted by the United Nations against the backdrop of the Cold War, it barred nations from doing certain things in space — like storing their nuclear weapons there. Nowadays, the treaty comes up in debates about whether we should send messages into space with the hope of reaching extraterrestrials. Some argue that’s dangerous because an alien species, once aware of us, might conquer and oppress us. Others argue it’ll be great — maybe the aliens will gift us their knowledge in the form of an Encyclopedia Galactica! Either way, it’s clear that the stakes are incredibly high and all of human civilization would be affected, prompting some to make the case for democratic deliberation before intentional transmissions are sent into space. As the old Roman proverb goes: What touches all should be decided by all. That is as true of superintelligent AI as it is of nukes, chemical weapons, or interstellar broadcasts. 

Lynk & Co just launched the 02, the company’s first fully-electric vehicle that’s designed from the ground up to be shared with family, friends, or anyone willing to pay for the privilege. The EV is interesting, but not nearly as interesting as Lynk & Co’s unique approach to car ownership. Once you buy, lease, or subscribe to a 02 you can become a “lender,” in Lynk & Co parlance, to set the price and conditions for sharing. In Amsterdam, a quick browse through the Lynk & Co app shows several of its 01 plug-in hybrids available to borrow for €7 to €12 per hour (or €47 to €123 per day), usually with a “no pets, no smoking” requirement. Borrowers are automatically billed for fuel consumed when the car is returned.

The first Intel Copilot+ PCs are arriving now thanks to the Core Ultra Series 2 CPUs, and the chip giant came ready to fight.

NASA’s Europa Clipper mission is set for launch, finally revealing if this icy moon of Jupiter is habitable or not.

Bluesky will now let you pin posts, apply language filters, and customize fonts and text sizes. The decentralized short posting platform announced these and other new features via the Threads account it created yesterday, seizing the chance to promote its superiority — “we’re not owned by a billionaire” — to increasingly frustrated users of its Meta rival. Complaints from Threads users have spiked in recent days following a flood of engagement bait posts being promoted to people’s feeds and reports of overly sensitive or inaccurate moderation causing accounts to be deleted or restricted. Threads boss Adam Mosseri said these issues are being looked into, but the chaos has presented Bluesky with a ripe opportunity to persuade Threads users...

The Philippines is preparing for the possibility of either a super typhoon or a significant earthquake, often referred to by Filipinos as the “big one.”

As the world marked the International Day of the Girl Child on Friday, a town hall held at UN Headquarters provided an opportunity for young women activists to engage directly with policymakers and offer recommendations on what they need to fully realise their rights. 

Aid entering the Gaza Strip is at its lowest level in months, and both the north and south of the enclave are at "breaking point", UN humanitarians said on Friday.

High in the mountains of Houaphanh province in the north of Lao People's Democratic Republic in an area historically known for opium cultivation, farmers are creating a more secure and sustainable future with the cultivation of coffee.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres congratulated the Japanese anti-nuclear weapons organization Nihon Hidankyo which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.

Amid escalating hostilities in Myanmar sparked by a 2021 military coup that have plunged millions into a deepening humanitarian crisis, UN Secretary-General António Guterres on Friday urged the country’s neighbours “to leverage their influence” to bring about peace. 

The number of Sudanese refugees in South Sudan has surpassed half a million, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, announced on Friday, as ongoing conflict in neighbouring Sudan continues to drive massive displacement.

The UN Secretary-General on Friday condemned recent attacks against peacekeeping personnel and premises in southern Lebanon.