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      Medical charlatans have existed through history. But AI has turbocharged them | Edna Bonhomme

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      Nearly a year into parenting, I’ve relied on advice and tricks to keep my baby alive and entertained. For the most part, he’s been agile and vivacious, and I’m beginning to see an inquisitive character develop from the lump of coal that would suckle from my breast. Now he’s started nursery (or what Germans refer to as Kita), other parents in Berlin, where we live, have warned me that an avalanche of illnesses will come flooding in. So during this particular stage of uncertainty, I did what many parents do: I consulted the internet.This time, I turned to ChatGPT, a source I had vowed never to use. I asked a straightforward but fundamental question: “How do I keep my baby healthy?” The answers were practical: avoid added sugar, monitor for signs of fever and talk to your baby often. But the part that left me wary was the last request: “If you tell me your baby’s age, I can tailor this more precisely.” Of course, I should be informed about my child’s health, but given my growing scepticism towards AI, I decided to log off.Earlier this year, an episode in the US echoed my little experiment. With a burgeoning measles outbreak, children’s health has become a significant political battleground, and the Department of Health and Human Services, under the leadership of Robert F Kennedy, has initiated a campaign titled the Make America Healthy Again commission, aimed at combating childhood chronic disease. The corresponding report claimed to address the principal threats to children’s health: pesticides, prescription drugs and vaccines. Yet the most striking aspect of the report was the pattern of citation errors and unsubstantiated conclusions. External researchers and journalists believed that these pointed to the use of ChatGPT in compiling the report.What made this more alarming was that the Maha report allegedly included studies that did not exist. This coincides with what we already know about AI, which has been found not only to include false citations but also to “hallucinate”, that is, to invent nonexistent material. The epidemiologist Katherine Keyes, who was listed in the Maha report as the first author of a study on anxiety and adolescents, said: “The paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with.”The threat of AI may feel new, but its role in spreading medical myths fits into an old mould: that of the charlatan peddling false cures. During the 17th and 18th centuries, there was no shortage of quacks selling reagents intended to counteract intestinal ruptures and eye pustules. Although not medically trained, some, such as Buonafede Vitali and Giovanni Greci, were able to obtain a licence to sell their serums. Having a public platform as grand as the square meant they could gather in public and entertain bystanders, encouraging them to purchase their products, which included balsamo simpatico (sympathetic balm) to treat venereal diseases.RFK Jr believes that he is an arbiter of science, even if the Maha report appears to have cited false information. What complicates charlatanry today is that we’re in an era of far more expansive tools, such as AI, which ultimately have more power than the swindlers of the past. This disinformation may appear on platforms that we believe to be reliable, such as search engines, or masquerade as scientific papers, which we’re used to seeing as the most reliable sources of all.Ironically, Kennedy has claimed that leading peer-reviewed scientific journals such as the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine are corrupt. His stance is especially troubling, given the influence he wields in shaping public health discourse, funding and official panels. Moreover, his efforts to implement his Maha programme undermine the very concept of a health programme. Unlike science, which strives to uncover the truth, AI has no interest in whether something is true or false.AI is very convenient, and people often turn to it for medical advice; however, there are significant concerns with its use. It is injurious enough to refer to it as an individual, but when a government significantly relies on AI for medical reports, this can lead to misleading conclusions about public health. A world filled with AI platforms creates an environment where fact and fiction meld into each other, leaving minimal foundation for scientific objectivity.The technology journalist Karen Hao astutely reflected in the Atlantic: “How do we govern artificial intelligence? With AI on track to rewire a great many other crucial functions in society, that question is really asking: how do we ensure that we’ll make our future better, not worse?” We need to address this by establishing a way to govern its use, rather than adopting a heedless approach to AI by the government.Individual solutions can be helpful in assuaging our fears, but we require robust and adaptable policies to hold big tech and governments accountable regarding AI misuse. Otherwise, we risk creating an environment where charlatanism becomes the norm.

      Edna Bonhomme is a historian of science More

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      Doge wants to replace our institutions with a tech utopia. It won’t work | Mike Pepi

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      Elon Musk has stepped away from Doge with very little “efficiency” to show for it. While it may have been more of a showpiece than real policy, this brutal and short experiment in Silicon Valley governance reveals a long-simmering battle between digital utopians and the institutional infrastructures critical to functioning democracies.Doge’s website dubiously claims $190bn in savings. The receipts show that they are less about efficiency than they are aimed at effective dissolution, a fate met by USAID, the federal agency responsible for distributing foreign assistance.Don’t be fooled. These brash new reductions are not just your garden-variety small-government crusades or culture-war skirmishes. This administration’s war on institutions derives from the newfound power of Silicon Valley ideology – a techno-determinism that views each institution’s function as potential raw material for capture by private digital platforms.All the while, Elon Musk sold the White House on an “AI-first strategy” for the US government. The recent executive order Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence mandates that barely tested Silicon Valley AI be jammed into the government’s work. It directs agencies to use AI to “lessen the burden of bureaucratic restrictions”. This is a thinly veiled attempt not just to reduce institutional activities; it’s also a degradation play.Doge makes plain an often misunderstood tension: Silicon Valley’s final dream is a world without institutions. Since the rise of the internet, startups have long encouraged, and profited from, institutional decline. This anti-institutionalism goes back to the roots of computing. Charles Babbage’s difference engine, central to modern computing, was built on technologies meant to control labor. It was a reflection of Babbage’s belief that the highest intention of the factory manager was to reduce the skill and cognitive complexity of laborers’ tasks. If the machine could manage production, humans – now smoothed-out automatons – would hardly need accompanying social protections, or even any governance at all.In 1948, Norbert Wiener founded the discipline of cybernetics, “the science of control and communications in the animal and machine”. This automated governance was eventually brought into direct competition with public institutions. The revolt against the state took many forms in the history of computing thereafter, from the libertarian California ideology (“information wants to be free”) to the very idea that a new “cyberspace” would be liberated from governments. Here the individual is an entrepreneur of the mind, able to instantly improve their lot without the mediating hand of the institutional form.To get to the real heart of Doge’s ideology, read The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond’s manifesto on building open-source software. For Raymond, cathedrals are “carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation”. This slow, deliberate work is no match for the networked and digitally enabled bazaar, where many software developers move fast by releasing early and often, delegate everything they can, and are open to the point of promiscuity. Something like scripture for computer engineers, Raymond’s ideas soon jumped out of the network and into governance of the physical world, where all human organizations were scrutinized as the maligned “cathedral”.Entrepreneurs loved this idea, too. The management method known as the “lean startup” is a lightweight program of data-driven optimizations designed to quickly scale businesses. Instead of human labor and judgment, lean startups use data and algorithms to experiment their way toward governance.But there’s a catch: a public institution is not supposed to be run like a digital startup. Silicon Valley may have carved out a niche in which its organizational philosophies mastered food delivery apps, AI girlfriends and money-laundering shitcoins, but the moment they take these methods to institutions entrusted with public welfare, they’ve lost the plot. Governments don’t have customers – they care for citizens. If classical liberalism had the state and its many sovereign institutions, and neoliberalism had the divine hand of the free market, today’s platform class elevates computation as the ultimate arbiter of truth. When presented with an institutional force, the platform class first asks: how could this be delivered by way of a digital platform?Digital technology doesn’t have to be this way. Good software can augment institutions, not be the rationale for their deletion. Building this future requires undoing Silicon Valley’s pernicious opposition to the institutional form. By giving into the digital utopian’s anti-institutionalism, we allowed them to reshape government according to their growth-at-all-costs logic.If the newly empowered digital utopianism goes unchecked, we face a platform-archy where black-box AI makes decisions once adjudicated through democratic institutions. This isn’t just a Silicon Valley efficiency fantasy; it’s on the roadmap of every authoritarian who ever sniffed power.Thankfully, the anti-Doge backlash was swift. The abrupt layoffs backfired, leading many Americans to fully understand just how much research and resources for advancing science, medicine and culture are tied to federal support.In the private sector, since capital is no longer free after the federal government hiked interest rates in 2022, the growth of the big Silicon Valley platforms have almost completely stalled. In search of an answer, Silicon Valley is making a big bet on AI, overwhelming users with automated answers that hallucinate and mislead at every turn. It’s becoming harder and harder for the average person to buy what the digital utopians are selling.The response to this assault on our institutions might be a kind of Digital New Deal – a public plan for institutions in the AI era. This 21st-century economics must go well beyond solving for mass unemployment. Reconstructing the institutional foundations of public goods such as journalism, libraries and higher education requires more than just restoring the public funds stripped by Doge. It will require forceful assertions about their regulatory value in the face of a fully automated slop state. Governments come and go, but free and open institutions are critical to the functioning of democracy. If we make the mistake of misrecognizing digital platforms for public institutions, we will not easily reverse Doge’s mistakes.

      Mike Pepi is a technologist and author who has written widely about the intersection between culture and the Internet. His book, Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia, was published by Melville House in 2025 More

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      Trump’s tax bill seeks to prevent AI regulations. Experts fear a heavy toll on the planet

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      US Republicans are pushing to pass a major spending bill that includes provisions to prevent states from enacting regulations on artificial intelligence. Such untamed growth in AI will take a heavy toll upon the world’s dangerously overheating climate, experts have warned.About 1bn tons of planet-heating carbon dioxide are set to be emitted in the US just from AI over the next decade if no restraints are placed on the industry’s enormous electricity consumption, according to estimates by researchers at Harvard University and provided to the Guardian.This 10-year timeframe, a period of time in which Republicans want a “pause” of state-level regulations upon AI, will see so much electricity use in data centers for AI purposes that the US will add more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than Japan does annually, or three times the yearly total from the UK.The exact amount of emissions will depend on power plant efficiency and how much clean energy will be used in the coming years, but the blocking of regulations will also be a factor, said Gianluca Guidi, visiting scholar at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.“By limiting oversight, it could slow the transition away from fossil fuels and reduce incentives for more energy-efficient AI energy reliance,” Guidi said.“We talk a lot about what AI can do for us, but not nearly enough about what it’s doing to the planet. If we’re serious about using AI to improve human wellbeing, we can’t ignore the growing toll it’s taking on climate stability and public health.”Donald Trump has vowed that the US will become “the world capital of artificial intelligence and crypto” and has set about sweeping aside guardrails around AI development and demolishing rules limiting greenhouse gas pollution.The “big beautiful” reconciliation bill passed by Republicans in the House of Representatives would bar states from adding their own regulations upon AI and the GOP-controlled Senate is poised to pass its own version doing likewise.Unrestricted AI use is set to deal a sizable blow to efforts to tackle the climate crisis, though, by causing surging electricity use from a US grid still heavily reliant upon fossil fuels such as gas and coal. AI is particularly energy-hungry – one ChatGPT query needs about 10 times as much electricity as a Google search query.Carbon emissions from data centers in the US have tripled since 2018, with an upcoming Harvard research paper finding that the largest “hyperscale” centers now account for 2% of all US electricity use.“AI is going to change our world,” Manu Asthana, chief executive of the PJM Interconnection, the US largest grid, has predicted. Asthana estimated that almost all future increase in electricity demand will come from data centers, adding the equivalent of 20m new homes to the grid in the next five years.The explosive growth of AI has, meanwhile, worsened the recent erosion in climate commitments made by big tech companies. Last year, Google admitted that its greenhouse gas emissions have grown by 48% since 2019 due to its own foray into AI, meaning that “reducing emissions may be challenging” as AI further takes hold.Proponents of AI, and some researchers, have argued that advances in AI will aid the climate fight by increasing efficiencies in grid management and other improvements. Others are more skeptical. “That is just a greenwashing maneuver, quite transparently,” said Alex Hanna, director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute. “There have been some absolutely nonsense things said about this. Big tech is mortgaging the present for a future that will never come.”While no state has yet placed specific green rules upon AI, they may look to do so given cuts to federal environmental regulations, with state lawmakers urging Congress to rethink the ban. “If we were expecting any rule-making at the federal level around data centers it’s surely off the table now,” said Hanna. “It’s all been quite alarming to see.”Republican lawmakers are undeterred, however. The proposed moratorium cleared a major hurdle over the weekend when the Senate parliamentarian decided that the proposed ban on state and local regulation of AI can remain in Trump’s tax and spending mega-bill. The Texas senator Ted Cruz, the Republican who chairs the Senate committee on commerce, science and transportation, changed the language to comply with the Byrd Rule, which prohibits “extraneous matters” from being included in such spending bills.The provision now refers to a “temporary pause” on regulation instead of a moratorium. It also includes a $500m addition to a grant program to expand access to broadband internet across the country, preventing states from receiving those funds if they attempt to regulate AI.The proposed AI regulation pause has provoked widespread concern from Democrats. The Massachusetts senator Ed Markey, a climate hawk, says he has prepared an amendment to strip the “dangerous” provision from the bill.“The rapid development of artificial intelligence is already impacting our environment, raising energy prices for consumers, straining our grid’s ability to keep the lights on, draining local water supplies, spewing toxic pollution in communities, and increasing climate emissions,” Markey told the Guardian.“However, instead of allowing states to protect the public and our planet, Republicans want to ban them from regulating AI for 10 years. It is shortsighted and irresponsible.”The Massachusetts congressman Jake Auchincloss has also called the proposal “a terrible idea and an unpopular idea”.“I think we have to realize that AI is going to suffuse in rapid order many dimensions of healthcare, media, entertainment, education, and to just proscribe any regulation of AI in any use case for the next decade is unbelievably reckless,” he said.Some Republicans have also come out against the provision, including the Tennessee senator Marsha Blackburn and the Missouri senator Josh Hawley. An amendment to remove the pause from the bill would require the support of at least four Republican senators to pass.Hawley is said to be willing to introduce an amendment to remove the provision later this week if it is not eliminated beforehand.Earlier this month, the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene admitted she had missed the provision in the House version of the bill, and that she would not have backed the legislation if she had seen it. The far-right House Freedom caucus, of which Greene is a member, has also come out against the AI regulation pause. More

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      Doge employee ‘Big Balls’ has resigned, says White House official

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      One of the US so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) service’s best-known employees, 19-year-old Edward Coristine, has resigned from the US government, a White House official said on Tuesday, a month after the acrimonious departure of his former boss Elon Musk.The White House official gave no further details on the move and Coristine did not immediately return an email seeking comment.Coristine worked at Musk’s brain connectivity company Neuralink before joining the tech billionaire as he led Doge established by the Trump administration earlier this year. Doge has overseen job cuts at almost every federal agency but is starting to see losses itself. Key Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, who was in charge of day-to-day running of Doge, has also left, along with others.The White House has said that Doge’s mission will continue.Coristine’s youth and online moniker “Big Balls” became a pop-culture meme as Doge swept through the US government, seizing data and firing employees en masse.Last month, Reuters reported that Coristine was one of two Doge associates promoting the use of AI across the federal bureaucracy. Media outlets, including Wired which first reported his departure, revealed that Coristine had been active in a chat room popular with hackers and previously had been fired from a job following an alleged data leak.In March, Reuters reported that Coristine had provided tech support to a cybercrime gang that had bragged about trafficking in stolen data and harassing an FBI agent.Beginning around 2022, while still in high school, Coristine ran a company called DiamondCDN that provided network services, according to corporate and digital records reviewed by Reuters and interviews with half a dozen former associates.Among its users was a website run by a ring of cybercriminals operating under the name “EGodly”, according to digital records preserved by the internet intelligence firm DomainTools and the online cybersecurity tool Any.Run.The digital records reviewed by Reuters showed the EGodly website, dataleak.fun, was tied to internet protocol addresses registered to DiamondCDN and other Coristine-owned entities between October 2022 and June 2023, and that some users attempting to access the site around that time would hit a DiamondCDN “security check”.In 2023, EGodly boasted on its Telegram channel of hijacking phone numbers, breaking into unspecified law enforcement email accounts in Latin America and Eastern Europe, and cryptocurrency theft.Early that year, the group distributed the personal details of an FBI agent who they said was investigating them, circulating his phone number, photographs of his house, and other private details on Telegram.EGodly also posted an audio recording of an obscene prank call made to the agent’s phone and a video, shot from the inside of a car, of an unknown party driving by the agent’s house in Wilmington, Delaware, at night and screaming out the window: “EGodly says you’re a bitch!“Reuters could not independently verify EGodly’s boasts of cybercriminal activity, including its claims to have hijacked phone numbers or infiltrated law enforcement emails. But it was able to authenticate the video by visiting the same Wilmington address and comparing the building to the one in the footage.The FBI agent targeted by EGodly, who is now retired, told Reuters that the group had drawn law enforcement attention because of its connection to swatting, the dangerous practice of making hoax emergency calls to send armed officers swarming targeted addresses. The agent didn’t go into detail. Reuters is not identifying him out of concern for further harassment.“These are bad folks,” the former agent said. “They’re not a pleasant group.” More

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      Musk is pivoting from DC and Doge’s failures – and wants investors to know

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      Elon Musk really wants the public – and investors – to know that he’s leaving Washington DC behind.In a series of interviews and social media posts this week, Musk has criticized Donald Trump’s marquee tax bill and emphasized his recommitment to leading SpaceX, Tesla and the artificial intelligence company xAI. The world’s richest person claimed that he was back to working around the clock at his companies – to the point of sleeping in conference rooms and factory offices once again.Musk has been telegraphing a pivot back to his businesses for months, but in recent appearances, he has repeatedly distanced himself from his unpopular stint in Washington while proclaiming that his new sole focus is his tech empire. It is a drastic turnaround for Musk, who spent most of the last year constantly at Trump’s side promoting far-right ideology online, appearing on stage at political rallies and pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the Republican party.The shift, which comes amid public and investor backlash against Musk’s political ambitions, was apparent this week as SpaceX launched and lost control of its Starship prototype rocket. Musk gave a round of media appearances to the Washington Post, Ars Technica, CBS News Sunday Morning and a YouTube aerospace influencer, all of which featured him emphasizing his dedication to his companies or attempting to explain away the shortcomings of his heavily criticized “department of government efficiency”.“The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized,” Musk told the Washington Post on Tuesday. “I thought there were problems, but it sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in DC, to say the least.”Musk additionally told the Post that Doge had been turned into a “whipping boy” that was criticized for anything that went wrong under the Trump administration. In Ars Technica, Musk admitted: “I think I probably did spend a bit too much time on politics.”Bashing Trump’s tax billThe turn from Trump’s self-appointed “first buddy” back to the familiar territory of space travel and tech has taken place as Doge faces numerous legal challenges and remains widely unpopular.Although Musk successfully seeded the government with his allies and helped gut regulators that would oversee his companies, Doge’s central promise to slash $2tn worth of fraud and waste has been an obvious failure. Doge’s cuts, while devastating to government services, humanitarian aid and the federal workforce, have amounted to little in terms of actual budget savings. Much of the savings it has claimed on its “wall of receipts” have also turned out to be false, including the cancellation of an $8bn contract that in reality was an $8m contract.Musk’s answer for Doge’s shortcomings appears to be casting the blame on some of his familiar foes: politicians and bureaucrats. In doing so, however, he has increasingly split with the Republican party – though notably stopped short of any criticism of Trump himself.Musk’s split with Congressional Republicans has been starkest on X, the social media platform that he owns. Musk’s posts have fully leaned into the narrative that Doge’s actions were successfully reducing waste, but that Congress hamstrung its operations through actions like approving Trump’s tax bill, which is expected to add $2.3tn to the deficit.Musk told CBS that he was “disappointed to see the massive spending bill, which increases the budget deficit …  and undermines the work that the Doge team is doing”.Now, Musk claims, he will focus on saving humanity through technologies like self-driving cars, interplanetary rockets and humanoid robots – exactly the products his companies need investors to believe in.“I have come to the perhaps obvious conclusion that accelerating GDP growth is essential,” Musk posted on Friday in response to a thread calling the GOP bill “disastrous” and demanding term limits on Congress. “Doge has and will do great work to postpone the day of bankruptcy of America, but the profligacy of government means that only radical improvements in productivity can save our country.”In a separate exchange, he replied to a conversation between two users with large followings who routinely praise his leadership and business acumen.“I think Elon is realizing that, despite the promises made by the new administration and a Republican-controlled Congress – and all the campaign platforms they ran on – the current incentive structures and entrenched special interests in government make it nearly impossible to enact any meaningful, long-term changes to address the many big issues we face,” one pro-Musk account posted.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“DOGE has done incredible work, but the GOP has failed to actually implement any of the cuts,” another prominent Musk-booster replied.“Yeah (Sigh),” Musk responded to the thread.Musk goes back to selling the futureWhat became clear throughout Musk’s time in Washington was that the public did not enjoy seeing him and many in the Trump administration did not like working with him. Numerous polls showed his overall popularity declining even as people supported the premise of reducing government inefficiencies. Musk’s prominent involvement in a Wisconsin supreme court election intensified opposition to his influence, while international demonstrations made him the face of the administration. Musk also found few friends within the Trump administration, with report after report of heated clashes with senior officials and some Republican political operatives warning his brand had become too toxic for the party.The pushback against Musk affected his businesses, causing Tesla sales to plummet to the point that the company’s board reportedly began considering replacing him as CEO. While Musk denied those claims, in recent weeks he has very loudly reaffirmed his dedication to leading his businesses.“Back to spending 24/7 at work and sleeping in conference/server/factory rooms,” he posted on Saturday. “I must be super focused on 𝕏/xAI and Tesla (plus Starship launch next week), as we have critical technologies rolling out.”While only a few weeks ago Musk’s posts on X were a nonstop stream of invectives against Democrats, fringe theories about immigration and demands to gut the judicial system, his online output has also changed. His posts this week have been heavily focused on SpaceX’s ambitions to go to Mars and Tesla’s self-driving car program, stopping only occasionally to promote attacks against “the woke mind virus” or feud with the government of his native South Africa.As Musk moves away from full-time politics and tries to win back investor confidence, he has also doubled down on his habit of making grandiose predictions of how his technologies will transform the world. Echoing a long list of previous claims that have missed deadlines and so far failed to come to fruition, he has promoted new endeavors like Tesla’s humanoid robots as crucial to the future of civilization.“Once you have humanoid robots, the actual economic output potential is tremendous. It’s really unlimited,” Musk said on stage at the Saudi-US Investment Forum on 13 May. “Potentially, we could have an economy 10 times the size of the global economy, where no one wants for anything.”Rather than dwell on a year of missed targets and intense backlash, Musk is back to selling a future where anything is possible. More

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      Elon Musk shows he still has the White House’s ear on Trump’s Middle East trip

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      Over the course of an eight-minute interview, Elon Musk touted his numerous businesses and vision of a “Star Trek future” while telling the crowd that his Tesla Optimus robots had performed a dance for Donald Trump and the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, to the tune of YMCA. He also announced that Starlink, his satellite internet company, had struck a deal for use in Saudi Arabia for maritime and aviation usage; looking to the near future, he expressed his desire to bring Tesla’s self-driving robotaxis to the country.“We could not be more appreciative of having a lifetime partner and a friend like you, Elon, to the Kingdom,” Saudi Arabia’s minister of communications and IT, Abdullah Alswaha, told Musk.Although Musk has pivoted away from his role as de facto leader of the so-called “department of government efficiency” and moved out of the White House, the Saudi summit showed how he is still retaining his proximity to the US president and international influence. As Musk returns to his businesses as his primary focus, he is still primed to reap the rewards of his connections and political sway over Trump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionStarlink diplomacyMusk’s Starlink announcement comes after a spate of countries have agreed to allow the satellite communications service to operate within their borders. Several countries that have approved Starlink did so after US state department officials mentioned the company by name or pushed for increased satellite services in negotiations over Trump’s sweeping tariffs, according to internal memos obtained by the Washington Post.Concerns over whether Musk and the Trump administration are leveraging their power to force countries into adopting Starlink has prompted calls for a state department inspector general investigation into whether there is undue influence at play in these agreements. On Wednesday, a group of Democratic senators issued a letter requesting a broad review of the state department’s alleged efforts to assist Starlink.“These reports indicate that Mr Musk may be using his official role and his proximity to the President as leverage for his own personal financial benefit – even if it comes at the expense of American consumers and the nation’s foreign policy interests,” the senators wrote.Musk’s empire expands in Saudi ArabiaThe Saudi-US Investment Forum summit was held in Riyadh and featured top ministers from the kingdom’s government as well as US cabinet secretaries Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnick. Saudi Arabia has been sinking billions into tech and artificial intelligence in recent years as it expands its portfolio of investments, in addition to its already extensive deals in industries such as defense and energy. The White House and Saudi government announced an arms deal worth $142bn following the event.Musk was one of a long list of Silicon Valley moguls and top executives of major US companies to attend the summit. The CEO of Palantir and Musk ally, Alex Karp, took part, as did the OpenAI CEO and Musk rival, Sam Altman. Amazon’s chief executive, Andy Jassy, and Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, were some of the other tech leaders present. The list also included CEOs from a range of boldface names such as Boeing, Coca-Cola and Halliburton.Earlier on Tuesday, Musk talked with Trump and Prince Mohammed inside the Saudi Royal Court and warmly greeted both leaders. Weeks before Musk’s arrival in Riyadh, his Twitter/X social media platform had managed to refinance some of its billions in debt with help from a Saudi fund. Tesla also launched in Saudi Arabia last month, opening a new showroom in the capital. More

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      Republicans propose prohibiting US states from regulating AI for 10 years

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      Republicans in US Congress are trying to bar states from being able to introduce or enforce laws that would create guardrails for artificial intelligence or automated decision-making systems for 10 years.A provision in the proposed budgetary bill now before the House of Representatives would prohibit any state or local governing body from pursuing “any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems” unless the purpose of the law is to “remove legal impediments to, or facilitate the deployment or operation of” these systems.The provision was a last-minute addition by House Republicans to the bill just two nights before it was due to be marked up on Tuesday. The House energy and commerce committee voted to advance the reconciliation package on Wednesday morning.The bill defines AI systems and models broadly, with anything from facial recognition systems to generative AI qualifying. The proposed law would also apply to systems that use algorithms or AI to make decisions including for hiring, housing and whether someone qualifies for public benefits.Many of these automated decision-making systems have recently come under fire. The deregulatory proposal comes on the heels of a lawsuit filed by several state attorneys general against the property management software RealPage, which the lawsuit alleges colluded with landlords to raise rents based on the company’s algorithmic recommendations. Another company, SafeRent, recently settled a class-action lawsuit filed by Black and Hispanic renters who say they were denied apartments based on an opaque score the company gave them.Some states have already inked laws that would attempt to establish safeguards around these systems. New York, for instance, passed a law that required automated hiring systems to undergo bias assessments. California has passed several laws regulating automated decision-making, including one that requires healthcare providers to notify patients when they send communications using generative AI. These laws may become unenforceable if the reconciliation bill passes.“This bill is a sweeping and reckless attempt to shield some of the largest and most powerful corporations in the world – from big tech monopolies to RealPage, UnitedHealth Group and others – from any sort of accountability,” said Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project. The new language is in line with Trump administration actions that aim to remove any perceived impediments to AI development. Upon taking office, Donald Trump immediately revoked a Biden administration executive order that created safety guardrails for the deployment and development of AI. Silicon Valley has long held that any regulation stifles innovation, and several prominent members of the tech industry either joined or backed the US president’s campaign, leading the administration to echo the same sentiment.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“State lawmakers across the country are stepping up with real solutions to real harms – this bill is a pre-emptive strike to shut those down before they gain more ground,” Hepner said. More

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      Maga’s sinister obsession with IQ is leading us towards an inhuman future | Quinn Slobodian

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      One thing that Donald Trump and his Silicon Valley partners share is an obsession with IQ. Being a “low-IQ individual” is a standard insult in the president’s repertoire, and being “high-IQ” is an equally standard form of praise for those on the tech right. Yet in the drive for US supremacy in artificial intelligence – signalled by the $500bn (£375bn) Stargate project announcement in the White House and an executive order to integrate AI into public education, beginning in kindergarten – there is a hidden irony. If their vision for our economic future is realised, IQ in the sense that they value will lose its meaning.IQ testing arose at a time when the US and other industrialised nations were worried about the health of their populations. Recruitment campaigns for the Boer war in the UK, and then the first world war elsewhere, showed male populations that were unhealthier than their fathers’ generation. Industrial work seemed to be triggering what looked like a process of degeneration, with a fearful endpoint in the subterranean Morlocks of HG Wells’s classic novella, The Time Machine. Intelligence tests were a way to salvage the diamonds from the rough and find a new officer class – and later a new elite – to guide mass society from the slough of despond into a braver future.When manufacturing still ruled in the US, IQ was valued as a way of measuring educational outcomes, but arguably it was not until the breakthrough of the information economy in the 1980s and 90s that knowledge workers became indisputably the vanguard of future prosperity. It is no coincidence that IQ talk surged in the 1990s, first through Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s infamous book, The Bell Curve, which suggested there were long-term and insurmountable gaps in IQ between racial groups, and second, more subtly through gifted and talented search programmes in the US that found kids and plucked them from public schools into supercharged summer programmes for the bright.One such person was Curtis Yarvin, the middle-aged software engineer and amateur political theorist who has drawn attention for his techno-monarchist philosophy and whose work has been positively cited by the US vice-president, JD Vance. As a youngster, Yarvin was part of Julian Stanley’s Center for Talented Youth. From the early 2000s to the present, he has been a consistent advocate for the importance of IQ as a measure of human worth. In the late 2000s, as an exponent of what came to be called the Dark Enlightenment, or “neo-reaction”, he suggested IQ tests could be used to disqualify voters in post-apartheid South Africa.Yarvin’s IQ fetishism was an organic outgrowth of the intellectual subculture of Silicon Valley. People who manipulated symbols and wrote code all day not surprisingly put special stock into the “general intelligence” measured by IQ, which gauged the proximity of minds to computers defined by logic, memory and processing speed.IQ fetishism had a history in the valley; one of the pioneers of the need to take eugenic measures to increase IQ was William Shockley, the inventor of the transistor (the building block of computer chips), who proposed that people with an IQ below the average of 100 should be given $1,000 per IQ point to sterilise themselves. In 2014, the American tech billionaire Peter Thiel said the problem with the Republican party was that too many of its leaders were “lower IQ” compared with those in the Democratic party. IQ was also a common focus of discussion on the popular blog Slate Star Codex and elsewhere in the so-called “rationalist” community.All of this would have remained a quirky symptom of San Francisco Bay Area chatboards were it not for the recent alliance between the world of the tech right and the governing party in Washington DC. The idea that intelligence is hardwired and resistant to early intervention or improvement through state programmes – that IQ is meaningful and real – brings us closer to what Murray and Herrnstein were advocating for in The Bell Curve in the 1990s, what they called “living with inequality”.The US Department of Education was set up in 1980 on a premise opposite to that of The Bell Curve. It worked on the belief that early interventions are crucial for brain development and that measuring outcomes was necessary to fine-tune interventions so that educational testing could produce more even results across the US. This department is in the process of being dismantled by Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency”, with the former World Wrestling Entertainment chief executive Linda McMahon promising to complete the task. Musk, like Trump, frequently refers to IQ as if it is a meaningful and important number. If you believe it is hardwired, then you too would want to destroy the Department of Education and stop trying to create standardised outcomes.People have cast around for ways to characterise the ideology that links the west coast of tech entrepreneurs and founders to the north-east and midwest of tycoons and conservatives around the Maga coalition. One way to see it is as a return to nature, a flight to a belief in implacable truths around intelligence, gender and race in the face of a changing world.Yet here’s the rub. That same coalition has bet the future of the US economy on breakthrough developments in artificial intelligence. To date, generative AI is primarily a means of automating away many of the very white-collar jobs that had previously been the heart of the knowledge economy. ChatGPT, its cheerleaders claim, can code better than a Stanford computer science graduate. It can make slides, take minutes and draft talking points quicker than any product of an elite liberal arts college. It can discover protein structures faster than any top hire from MIT. The argument in favour of paying attention to IQ was that, unfair or not, it was a ticket on to the escalator of upward mobility and meritocracy associated with jobs in finance, tech, advertising and even public service or higher education. If those jobs are whittled down to a nub, then on its own terms, the point of caring about IQ vanishes as well.As Musk has said himself, “we are all extremely dumb” compared with the “digital super intelligence” that he is helping to build through initiatives such as his model at xAI, which recently bought the social media platform X. The Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen wrote once that software was eating the world. If their predictions are true, it will eat the right’s precious IQ too.

      Quinn Slobodian’s latest book is Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right

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