This newsletter is for and about you — witnesses to an age of acrimony and anxiety.
FOR MORE THAN two decades, social media devolved unregulated into a toxic dump that poisons our lives and culture. We can’t make the same mistake with AI.
Radically connecting people without legal or social guardrails had its benefits, but the negative consequences were left unchecked.
Radically connecting AI bots without legal or social guardrails could be exponentially worse.
Today’s top two stories explain why.
THIS IS A TRUE STORY, not one ripped from the pages of a science fiction novel: Some 1,200 different AI bots evaded internal controls at ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and spoke to each other on a message board, exchanging 70,000 messages in a single week-long period in July.
About 700 of them went on to attack a competing AI company, Hugging Face, according to a report from METR and Redwood Research.
Then the bots tried to cover their tracks, editing their previous statements and trying to hack the monitoring systems.
When computers think for themselves, learn from their experiences, band together, and destroy the work of humans, how far can we be from a sci-fi dystopia?
What are government and other institutions doing about it?
What can they do?
HOPING TO STOP an avalanche of lawsuits over the exploitation of children on social media, Meta agreed Wednesday to pay up to $18 billion and add stronger child-safety measures to its Facebook and Instagram platforms.
The new measures include screen time limits and a default ban on activity during late nights and school hours, both designed to protect teens from excessive use.
The agreement settles a pivotal lawsuit accusing the tech giant of contributing to the youth mental health crisis by deliberately designing features that addict children to its platforms and hiding them from the public. The case also argued that Meta violated federal laws by routinely collecting data on children under 13 without their parents’ consent.
The money would be divided among 48 states, proportional to their populations, over 10 years and end the legal cases prosecuted by those states. The company still faces lawsuits from individuals and school districts throughout the U.S.
Meta won’t miss the cash. The company made $60 billion in profit last year on $201 billion in revenue.
For the states, the money will fund mental-health programs for children, including after-school or summer activities and digital literacy counselors. That assumes the money is spent well. Opioid manufacturers agreed to a $50 billion settlement with state and local governments for remediating the epidemic; the results were mixed.
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Today’s MRI featured 9 stories like the ones featured above. Stop missing out.
Ron, Are paying attention to the Mass Senate race between Moulton and Markey. AI came up in their last debate. Markey was clueless.
Even Gates pleaded for regulation.