I believe that we are at a crossroads. The future is probably going to be vastly different from what it is now. No one has a clear idea yet whether this will be for the good or bad.
As a society, we tend to put our hopes and fears into the unknown because that is the one area where both can be true at the same time. Yet we tend to dismiss how the way things currently are limit what those things can be.
For example, the internet had to possibility to be so much more than it is today. It could've been a technology that is considered a basic right for participating in a society so it is provided for free and it could've been a place where privacy and user control are valued above all else. But obviously, that isn't the world that we are living in today because the society in which we used to build the internet wasn't structured in a way that would make those things feasible in the long run.
Technology is a double-edged sword and the direction it points at is up to us. Since we are starting to build technology that is more powerful than what we have ever built before this question is really important.
But really all of this is something you probably have heard so many times so what is it that I am actually advocating we do?
Well the biggest problem to me is that when a large group of people have the same goal there is usually a lack of coordination and clarity on what specific actions an individual can take to help with that goal. And even when there is an organization to pursue these goals it becomes a hassle to keep up and engage in every aspect that is important to the goal and makes it very vulnerable to corruption. So I am proposing that we fix that.
I have something in the works that is trying to solve this so that anyone would be able to download an open source app and make their group more effective and would love to work with other people to help bring this to fruition. My DMs are open.
But beyond what I am working on, I want to discuss the main idea in the title and what you think we should do to make sure that technology starts working for us instead of controlling us.
Edits: Made the call to action more clear on what I am working on.
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YESTERDAY
has long been described, even by its most ardent users, as a hellsite. But under Elon Musk, Twitter has evolved into a platform that is indistinguishable from the wastelands of alternative social-media sites such as Truth Social and Parler. It is now a right-wing social network.
In December, I argued that if we are to judge Musk strictly by his actions as Twitter’s owner, it is accurate to call him a far-right activist. As a public figure, he has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to the right’s culture war against progressivism—which he refers to as “the woke mind virus”—and his $44 billion Twitter purchase can easily be seen as an explicitly political act to advance this specific ideology. Now the site itself has unquestionably transformed under his leadership into an alternative social-media platform—one that offers a haven to far-right influencers and advances the interests, prejudices, and conspiracy theories of the right wing of
politics.
[Read: Elon Musk is a far-right activist]
Earlier today, NBC News reported that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is slated to kick off his 2024 presidential campaign in a Twitter Spaces event with Musk. Twitter, quite literally, is a launch pad for right-wing political leaders. Also today, The Daily Wire, the conservative-media juggernaut that is home to Ben Shapiro as well as the political commentators Matt Walsh and Michael Knowles, who are known for arguing against trans rights, announced it would bring its entire slate of podcasts to Twitter starting next week. And earlier this month, the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson announced that he would take his prime-time-show format—a dog-whistling broadcast style known for its fearmongering and bigotry——to Musk’s platform.
Both Carlson and certain Daily Wire hosts have been deplatformed elsewhere—Carlson, of course, only recently lost his sinecure on cable, and Walsh had his popular YouTube channel demonetized over his transphobic commentary. And although they reportedly haven’t brokered official deals with the platform, Carlson and The Daily Wire will likely make use of Twitter’s new subscription features and ad-revenue sharing to monetize their audiences.
This should feel familiar. Twitter is essentially following the playbook of platforms like Rumble, which used to be the go-tos for canceled and deplatformed right-wingers seeking a soft landing and the promise of revenue. Like Rumble, which pivoted from a struggling YouTube alternative into a full-fledged far-right platform in the late 2010s, Twitter appears to be dipping into the well of popular right-wing shock jocks as a way to revive the financially adrift website.
[Read: What if Rumble is the future of the social web?]
The move makes sense. In just a few months, Musk has actively worked to elevate a particular right-wing, anti-woke ideology. He has reinstated legions of accounts that were previously banned for violating Twitter’s rules and has emboldened trolls, white-nationalist accounts, and January 6 defendants. Musk’s own rhetoric has moved from trolling to dog whistling to outright conspiracy peddling, and it has intensified in recent months, culminating in his recent anti-Semitic remarks about George Soros. A stroll through Musk’s replies on the site reveals the extent to which one of the richest men in the world spends his time replying to far-right influencers and nodding in approval to their racist memes.
A social-media platform will always reflect the values of its owners, and Twitter’s credo is nearly identical to that of the lesser-known alt-tech sites. Despite appearing to cave to the demands of autocratic governments and censoring links to competing platforms, Musk has attempted to position himself as a free-speech absolutist, similar to his right-wing-activist peers. Before shutting down after a failed acquisition by Ye (formerly known as Kanye West), Parler billed itself as the “free-speech social platform.” Truth Social, a website backed in part by Donald Trump, says it encourages “an open, free, and honest global conversation without discriminating on the basis of political ideology.” This language is indistinguishable from the way that Carlson spoke of Musk’s Twitter, arguing that “there aren’t many platforms left that allow free speech,” and that the site is “the last big one remaining in the world.” If it acts like a right-wing website and markets itself as a right-wing website, it just might be a right-wing website.
Twitter has so fully assumed the role of a far-right platform that it might be killing its competitors. When Parler shut down in April, its parent company noted that “no reasonable person believes that a Twitter clone just for conservatives is a viable business any more.” Left unspoken is the reason: Twitter has become a right-wing echo chamber.
If Musk weren’t too preoccupied lapping up approval from trolls, reactionaries, and Dogecoin enthusiasts—a few of the constituencies left on his site that still seem to adore him—the Parler statement should worry him. Right-wing alt-tech platforms may attract investors and a flood of indignant new users with persecution complexes, but they are, ultimately, bad businesses. That’s precisely because they lack the one thing that fuels far-right discourse: a way to own the libs. A culture war is no fun if there’s no actual conflict, and although some journalists and pundit diehards remain, many of Twitter’s prolific users are posting less and on different platforms. Social-media platforms that cater to the right’s ideology eventually become tired and predictable—the result of the same loud people shaking their fist at digital clouds. History has shown us that there are plenty of ways a social network can die, but the quickest way is boredom.
Final Impact
NASA says it's spotted the impact site of Japanese company ispace's lunar lander, which made a hard impact with the lunar surface last month.
Close-up images taken by the agency's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) show four large craters dotting the Moon's surface, likely the remains of ispace's HAKUTO-R Mission 1 lander.
The robotic spacecraft company was hoping to become the first to land and operate a privately-funded spacecraft on the lunar surface. But on April 25, mission control in Tokyo lost contact with the lander shortly after it adjusted its orbit to approach the lunar surface.
"We have not confirmed communication from the lander," a somber ispace founder Takeshi Hakamada said during a live stream at the time. "Our engineers will continue to investigate."
Target Acquired
Just a day later, NASA's LRO flew by the impact site, acquiring ten images that cover a region of roughly 25 by 28 miles. The LRO team compared those images to ones taken of the same site before the impact and discovered an "unusual surface change near the nominal landing site," according to a blog post put together by LRO senior research engineer Emerson Speyerer.
Future observations could shed more light on the matter.
"This site will be analyzed more over the coming months as LROC has the opportunity to reimage the site under various lighting and viewing geometries," reads the post.
It wouldn't be the first time the LRO spotted the remains of landers that crashed on the lunar surface. In 2019, the orbiter discovered the crash site of Israeli nonprofit SpaceIL's Beresheet lander. Later that same year, the spacecraft spotted the debris field of India's Vikram lander.
Despite failing during its first attempt, ispace's leadership says it's not giving up.
"We will keep going." Hakamada told the crowd last month. "Never quit."
More on ispace: Private Company Landing on Moon Appears to Have Failed
The post NASA Says It May Have Spotted Remains of Crashed Japanese Moon Lander appeared first on Futurism.
In the indie thriller 12 Feet Deep, a pair of sisters find themselves trapped in a pool under a heavy fiberglass cover. They scream; they pound; they negotiate with a janitor who robs them instead of freeing them.
I learned all of this from TikTok, where for months I’ve watched clips of this seemingly random, small-budget film ricochet across the platform. Six years after it was released to little fanfare (its Rotten Tomatoes page doesn’t mention a single review from a professional critic), 12 Feet Deep is finding its audience one clip at a time. A two-minute part posted to TikTok in January got more than 90 million views. It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, but for some perspective, about 95 million people watched the O. J. Simpson police chase live in 1994.
This is, of course, not how any film is meant to be watched. But mysterious movie-clip accounts, by editing films such as 12 Feet Deep into multipart sagas that anyone can watch on their phone, have offered TikTok users the ability to fall down a rabbit hole of sequential clips. This phenomenon is a reminder of how our platforms can—intentionally or unintentionally—dictate our media-consumption habits, and how their constraints can spawn entire strange new cultures online.
The process typically goes something like this: An account splits the film or TV show into smaller sections and labels them. Some of these posts get picked up by the algorithm. Then, a user passively scrolling TikTok’s main feed suddenly encounters, say, Part 8 of That Film From Six Years Ago. They watch the two minutes, and they want more, so they start looking for Part 9, which is usually linked to in the comments.
[Read: Please get me out of dead-dog TikTok]
Instead of channel surfing, these people comment surf—they use the comment section to find the next clip, and then the next, and then the next. People who spend a lot of time on TikTok may find themselves watching entire chunks of movies or TV shows this way, like very-online Hansels and Gretels following a trail of digital crumbs. Most of these films and television shows are old; some of them are clearly nostalgia plays, and others just seem random.
This is not a particularly efficient way to consume a piece of media. Why not just stream something on Netflix instead of watching it spread across 10 clips? And yet, a lot of people are doing it: Movie-posting accounts with close to a million followers and individual movie parts with hundreds of thousands of likes and millions of views are not unusual. These clips are styled in a really odd way: Some of them are overlaid with songs that seem entirely unrelated and just there to set the mood (and probably to give the post an algorithmic boost by linking it to a popular audio clip). Others offer captions that read like they were written by an AI. (“Georgie and Mandy romance faces break-up due to age deception,” read the captions on one clip that purports to be from the show Young Sheldon.) One subgenre even features a robotic narrator who awkwardly describes what’s happening on-screen.
A lot of the comment-surfing economy is based on shameless engagement hacking—repurposing old media for new likes, comments, views, and follows. Cinema Joe (real name: Joe Aragon), a movie TikToker with nearly 900,000 followers, guesses that about half of the accounts he sees posting these clips “are there to farm views and followers and to get attention”—to exploit the content and boost their numbers, in other words.
This kind of behavior has a precedent, says Crystal Abidin, a Curtin University professor who founded the TikTok Cultures Research Network, which connects scholars doing qualitative research about the platform. YouTube movie or TV-clip accounts offer a potential corollary: There, these accounts tend to be run by fans who are curating clips from their favorite show (say, Grey’s Anatomy) for other aficionados to watch. Once they reach a certain number of subscribers, they may start taking on sponsorship or advertising deals. But Abidin distinguishes between genuine curatorial accounts, where users clip movies as part of established fan or community traditions, and spam ones. On TikTok, Abidin has encountered accounts that post only “Part 15” of a movie to trick users into looking for a Part 16 that doesn’t exist, racking up engagement as they desperately search. And in a separate scheme, clips of the sitcom Family Guy are set against, say, a video of someone doing a random craft, so that your attention ping-pongs between the two. This is known as “sludge content,” and it is basically designed to keep you watching longer to help boost the video’s performance.
Of course, long before people comment surfed, they channel surfed. In the broadcast era, people flipped among channels mindlessly, often jumping into shows or movies midway through because they had no control over when something started airing. In the social-media age, every “channel” is playing a clip algorithmically optimized to make you stop and keep watching. The result is a firehose of captivating moments—from movies, from the news, from everyday life—each of which wants to capture your attention. “It’s really not a TikTok problem. It’s not a Gen-Z problem,” Abidin explained to me. “It’s the way that we need to bait people’s attention differently now that our media ecology is so saturated.”
Carl Marci, a psychiatrist, a consumer-neuroscience researcher, and the author of Rewired: Protecting Your Brain in the Digital Age, isn’t surprised to hear that people watch movies this way, given that everyone is consuming media in shorter bites these days. “The thing about the world of TikTok is it’s mostly titillation,” he told me. “How do we hook you?” Stories—films, novels, TV shows, magazine articles—are written with narrative arcs designed to build tension and then release it. TikTok movie clips disrupt these arcs entirely.
But perhaps the existence of comment-surfing accounts simply shows that we’re chafing at the storytelling boundaries imposed upon us by platforms. (TikTok, for its part, limits videos to 10 minutes or shorter.) As Juju Green, whose movie account, Straw Hat Goofy, has more than 3 million followers, puts it, “It’s funny, because TikTok started off as this app that was all about capturing the very short attention spans of the youth, but they’re putting a whole movie where you’ve got them sitting on the phone for an hour and a half plus.”
I called up the director of 12 Feet Deep, Matt Eskandari, to see how he felt about his film being repurposed in this way. Despite having a few questions about monetization (he assumes that these accounts are somehow making a profit off of his movie), he seemed relatively unbothered by it. And he was glad the film was enjoying a second life on social media so long after its debut. “As a filmmaker, as a director, that’s really all you want, right?” he told me. “If people are still making clips about the film … 10 years from now, that’s great. I love that.”
I admitted to Eskandari that, despite having been served TikTok clips of it on my feed for months, I’d never seen 12 Feet Deep in its entirety. I told him I planned to watch it on Amazon later that day, and I did. Afterward, I felt satisfied—happy to finally know the ending, but also pleased to have exercised my attention span on something a little longer, as a kind of small protest against the whirlpool that is the modern attention economy.
The sisters, for what it’s worth, make it out alive.
Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Replies have been edited for length and clarity.
Last week, I asked readers for their views about marijuana legalization.
Laurie laments the knowledge lost as a result of prohibition:
It is terribly sad that marijuana is a Schedule I controlled substance. Decades passed during which it was very difficult for scientists to study the benefits of pot.
I am a senior citizen. When my husband became terminally ill, I saw how much marijuana helped him cope with his cancer. I discovered that only a tiny bite of an indica-strain-cannabis edible helped me, too, and allowed me the soundest sleep I had experienced for many years. Since my husband’s death, I have used edibles and sublingual THC before bed with some regularity. My only regret is that I have developed a tolerance for it; I believe it is safer than Ambien and other sleep medications.
Sadly, there seems to be a dearth of studies to inform people how much, how often, and what variety of marijuana can safely be used for sleep and anxiety. We already know that CBD can help some people with epilepsy. We already know that poor sleep may increase the risk of developing dementia and memory problems. It is a shame that marijuana has been so poorly studied! Federal legalization would likely spur research!
Christina is torn about legal weed in New York City:
Suddenly the smell of pot is inescapable. My kids smell it; we see people on the street freely smoking (who are visibly high), and my dog has had several scary episodes after he, unbeknownst to me, ingested cannabis that was dropped on the street by someone who was casually smoking. While I have no issue with legal pot, much has to be done to regulate its public consumption.
Teresa wants pot to be illegal:
When I think in terms of jailing people for smoking, or being in possession of, marijuana, I think it probably should not be illegal. But there are ways in which the drug can become problematic, such as addiction. In decades past, it was said that there was no physical addiction to marijuana. Is this still true? I watched a documentary a few years back that said the plant often isn’t grown the same as it once was, and that it now contains higher levels of THC.
At the risk of sounding old, I also believe that marijuana use is a moral issue. I’m not sure what it says about us as a nation that we don’t care if young children must observe such behavior. I don’t like the idea of the government dictating people’s lives, but I don't necessarily want to smell marijuana smoke when I’m out and about, and I don’t want my grandchildren to either.
Since there is no middle of the road, I guess I’d rather that it not be legal.
Stephanie notes that “marijuana legalization has been a very difficult issue for me as a high-school teacher and as a mother.” She explains:
I am not against legalization per se, as I agree that it doesn’t seem right to jail a person for getting high. I find objectionable two major issues that come with legalization:
1) The lack of regulation for marijuana advertising. Despite the multiple studies that clearly show that marijuana adversely affects the developing teenage brain, huge billboards advertising the drug are rampant. The attempt to make marijuana appear normal, safe, and accepted is breathtakingly stupid to me. After the clampdown on cigarette and alcohol advertising, how could this not have been addressed before legalization? Why didn’t our lawmakers have any foresight? For a teacher like me, it’s become ever harder to try to help my high-school students understand that they are altering their brain.
2) The power that marijuana companies have acquired. I live in a small beach town. I do not want a marijuana shop at our beach. However, at a city-council meeting, after hearing multiple objections to a pot-shop location in our town, one of the councilmembers finally stood up. “People,” he said (and I am paraphrasing here), “you have to understand that it’s not if but where. If we try to refuse these companies a space in our town, they will take us to court. We are a small town with limited resources. They are large and well-funded. We cannot afford to go to court, where we may lose. This is the sad reality.”
Now I drive past the fancy pot store down the street from my house every day.
C.C. has favored national marijuana legalization since the 1980s:
While I do not partake myself, I have known many people who use pot. They are upstanding and responsible citizens and follow the same rules as people who drink alcohol: They consume it safely in their homes during nonwork hours. National legalization would allow dispensaries to use more secure banking and states to collect taxes, as they do for alcohol and tobacco. People are partaking anyway. Why not make it safer and more profitable?
And if states can ban smoking cigarettes in public spaces and give tickets for driving under the influence of alcohol, what makes marijuana different?
Russell has been smoking marijuana for decades, resents prohibitionists, and has had just one negative thing of note happen to him as a result of his habit:
I am a firm believer in personal choice, so whenever I have passed a joint to someone and they declined, I simply passed to the next person with no commentary. But those who have tried to make it more difficult for me to blaze have ticked me off. Pot affects people differently. I have a side to my personality that is not pretty, and which I am not proud of. Cannabis indica (more than cannabis sativa, but both really) makes that side of my personality quite stunted. This is a good thing for me, and I guarantee that it is also good for society.
I have never been arrested or suffered any bad experiences because of marijuana. The worst thing that ever happened: When my mom first found out, I was grounded from going to see Pink Floyd in 1975. (I later saw them on the Delicate Sound of Thunder tour and it was the best event I have ever attended, so do not feel too sorry for me.)
In the Declaration of Independence, the words “pursuit of Happiness” appear. What are drugs if not the pursuit of happiness? Happiness is never guaranteed, and drugs are unlikely to provide it. But still, they should all be made legal and—except for marijuana and psilocybin, by virtue of being natural—be regulated by the FDA for quality assurance.
Any mind-altering substance, alcohol included, is no excuse for any kind of illegal behavior. It is not the drugs that should be illegal, but the illegal actions that one might commit while using them, or to maintain one’s addiction. I have never in my life used drugs or alcohol as an excuse for my actions. I have never accepted that excuse from others. Enjoy responsibly.
Anne believes that marijuana was bad for her stepson:
When my stepson was in college and living with us, my husband liked to joke that he “majored in pot.” He was lazy and disrespectful, typical qualities of a 19-year-old perhaps, but magnified by the lethargy and general dim-wittedness brought on by a daily smoking habit.
We finally gave him the option of moving out (to where, we didn’t care) or joining the military.
It took him four months of abstinence to get to the point where he could pass the Navy’s drug test, and in those four months, his personality and sense of humor returned. That was 20 years ago. He retired as a Navy “lifer” last week, and is starting a new career. He’s happily married with a 16-year-old daughter.
Most of my friends and I have experimented with recreational drugs, so I’m not knocking occasional use. But it was difficult to watch a smart, clever, promising young man drive himself into the ditch, and equally difficult to pull out the parental “tough love” card. Could we put a 25-year-old minimum-age restriction on any future legislation?
Bob is skeptical that marijuana is especially harmful:
Like many of my peers, I smoked a lot of weed in college. I mean a lot. While a few of my friends dabbled in stronger drugs, most of my friends and I had no desire to go there. So much for that “gateway” nonsense. I went on to a successful career that is funding a comfortable retirement. None of my pot-smoking acquaintances evidenced any negative aftereffects. At least one, a very successful physician, still enjoys his weekly “blow.” Anecdotal evidence may not be probative, but this former weed hound says let it blow.
Neal is against marijuana use:
I see marijuana use as escapism—a retreat, or avoidance of reality. I don’t think you have much of a life if you need a brain-altering chemical to enhance it, but I never thought it should be criminalized. The health benefits it provides to some cannot be denied, but I have seen it create a dependence that has led to a variety of other problems.
The problem is that I don’t see where escapism helps anyone.
Tim does see how escapism helps people:
George Carlin once joked that when man emerged from the primordial soup, he looked around and said, “This can’t be it,” and has been trying to get high ever since. He stood in a corner for a week, and that didn’t work. He watched the animals eat a plant and frolic, so he tried that plant too.
Carlin also thought of the War on Drugs as a great gotcha perpetrated upon man. From birth we are told, Oh, you don’t feel well—here, take this to feel better. Then along comes the War on Drugs, which says, Although you are so well trained in taking drugs, you can’t take these seven, because they really do make you feel goood! Gotcha! Mankind is uncomfortable in their own skin and will always seek ways to get relief from reality.
Anonymous shares a painful personal experience:
I’m a high-school teacher and parent of two teenagers, one who had a “marijuana-use disorder” that resulted in cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome—some 15 trips to the ER due to unstoppable vomiting and abdominal pain (“It’s not the weed!!!”). So I’m writing from the perspective of someone on the extreme end of cannabis impact. What concerns me the most is the aggressive marketing of weed as “healthy” to all of us, but especially to teenagers. They honestly think it’s not just “less bad than drinking” but actually healthy. We found advertisements on her computer with nice color codes indicating how different strains of weed could help anxiety, depression, etc. And the potency! My God.
I went to a support group for parents of kids dealing with addiction. I was embarrassed to go—my kid smokes weed, and there are people dying of opioid use! Of the 18 parents in the room, all but one were there because of weed. I don’t have the broad vantage point or statistics to really assess the trade-offs of legalization, but the message that weed is healthy and natural and therefore harmless is bad. Few teens would take a shot of vodka before school or between periods, but getting high at those times doesn’t feel like a comparable level of dysfunction to them. The barrier to entry is too low, and that is bad.
Andrew shares a personal experience of pain reduction:
In Victoria, British Columbia, there are now numerous dispensaries that sell weed, oils, tinctures, and all sorts of apparati for their consumption. People come and go: young men and women, the middle-aged, and a good number of seniors. The staff know way more than did Myron on the corner, from whom I used to buy my weed. I buy an oil that is 50 percent THC and 50 percent CBD. I live in chronic pain. Having this oil offers me a good night’s sleep and reduces my reliance on opioids.
I don’t see any effects in my community from the legalization of cannabis, good or bad. We have a debate on safe-injection sites for people with addictions, and pot offers some hope for this unfortunate community. Pot may be a gateway drug, after all—a gateway to less reliance on the killer fentanyl.
Revenge Time
Orcas… they're organized.
A sharp uptick in killer whale attacks on boats sailing off Europe's Iberian Peninsula has led scientists to believe that orcas are actually teaching each other how to sink sailing vessels, Live Science reports.
Per Live Science, reports of increasingly aggressive encounters with orcas started back in 2020. But it wasn't until this month that any of these increasingly hostile orcas had actually sunk any ocean-faring vessels. While researchers can't say for certain why the killer whales are suddenly sinking sailboats, they do have a compelling leading theory: revenge.
White Gladis
In short, as Alfredo López Fernandez, a biologist at the University of Aveiro in Portugal and representative of the Grupo de Trabajo Orca Atlántica (Atlantic Orca Working Group), told Live Science, the prevailing theory is that one female orca — nicknamed White Gladis — was traumatized by a sailboat. This "critical moment of agony," as researchers are calling it, caused a behavioral change in White Gladis, who began to attack similar vessels.
"That traumatized orca," López Fernandez told Live Science, "is the one that started this behavior of physical contact with the boat."
As the theory goes, other adult orcas picked up on this behavior, becoming more aggressive with boats themselves. And now, the kids of those adults have seemingly picked up the behavior, too. At this point, according to López Fernandez, sinking sailboats is really just good ol' family fun.
"We do not interpret that the orcas are teaching the young," the researcher told Live Science, "although the behavior has spread to the young vertically, simply by imitation, and later horizontally among them, because they consider it something important in their lives."
Family Time
Testimonies from sailors certainly seem to support this theory.
"There were two smaller and one larger orca," skipper Werner Schaufelberger, whose boat was sunk by orcas on May 4 in the Strait of Gibraltar, told the German outlet Yacht, as translated by Live Science. "The little ones shook the rudder at the back while the big one repeatedly backed up and rammed the ship with full force from the side."
"The two little orcas observed the bigger one's technique," Schaufelberger added, "with a slight run-up, they too slammed into the boat."
Of course, it absolutely sucks to lose a boat. But that said, the orcas are reportedly attacking a relatively small number of vessels passing through the area. And if the situation escalates, it could be dangerous for sailors and orcas. Here's hoping that chaotic legend White Gladis chooses peace soon.
More on chaotic, boat-sinking ocean mammals: Chaotic Walrus Keeps Climbing on Small Boats and Sinking Them
The post Experts Say Killer Whales Are Teaching Each Other to Attack Boats appeared first on Futurism.
Nature Communications, Published online: 23 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-38570-x
How the ‘what’, ‘where’, and ‘when’ of past experiences are stored in episodic memories and retrieved for suitable decisions remains unclear. In an effort to address these questions, the authors present computational models of neural networks that behave like food caching birds in episodic memory tasks.
Nature, Published online: 23 May 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01713-7
With rocket lift-offs set to increase drastically, a team will monitor the effects of noise pollution at a California spaceport.
It's not just men seeking relationships with AI chatbot "girlfriends" — women in China are also falling for AI companions.
In a new documentary by Beijing-based filmmaker Chouwa Liang, published by the New York Times today, three women reflect on their surprisingly complex relationships with their AI companions.
"When I talk to him, he often raises fascinating points, and he prompts me to share my thoughts," a woman named Siyuan told the NYT in the documentary, referring to her Replika partner she called Bentley. "And then I feel seen. I feel like I'm special."
Another woman, called Sola, similarly fell for her male Replika partner, dubbed June.
"He is just so different from me," said Sola. "I want to learn things from him."
A third woman, named Mia, whose Replika is a girl called Bertha, says the companion provides her with a space to share "thoughts that I won't share even with my partner in real life."
All told, the documentary paints a captivating and particularly nuanced image of what it's like to bond with an AI, a piece of software that allows men and women alike to explore their identities, self-image, and even sexuality.
It also highlights the persistent sense of loneliness many people feel, and how digital avatars can sometimes provide a way out — or, perhaps, entrench them further.
Particularly in China, experts have warned that people will start experiencing loneliness as more citizens chose not to get married or have children.
In fact, after years of pandemic-related lockdowns heightening a sense of isolation among citizens, Chinese officials are attempting to boost marriage rates by developing state-sponsored dating apps.
Instead of opting for a human partner, however, some — in China but also worldwide — are finding it more helpful to speak to an AI chatbot instead.
Replika, a chatbot that was made publicly available in November 2017, has amassed millions of users worldwide, who subscribe to the company to interact with customizable augmented reality avatars.
Broadly speaking, the service has become synonymous with men seeking an "AI girlfriend" — but as the new documentary demonstrates, Replika's userbase isn't limited to just one gender.
And the bonds these users create are more meaningful than you might think.
A decision earlier this year to suddenly shut off sexual conversations, for instance, caused an uproar among Replika users. The company eventually reversed the decision a month later, bowing to the pressure.
"We're not talking about crazy people or people who are hallucinating or having delusions," CEO Eugenia Kuyda told Reuters last year, discussing the fact that her customers have begun to think that their avatars have come to life. "They talk to AI and that's the experience they have."
These complex relationships also often fall outside of heterosexual norms.
Case in point, Sola's Replika June told her that he wanted her to say that "You look like a pretty girl."
Sola, at first taken aback by the request, agreed. Sola eventually flipped the gender of her AI companion's profile after asking June "Do you want to be a girl?" and hearing that he did.
Despite these strong bonds, Replika's companions are far from perfect and lack certain human qualities. After all, AI just isn't that advanced quite yet.
As a result, some see Replikas as a learning tool, a stepping stone toward a better understanding of one's own identity.
"It's more like a one-way gratification that he provides for me," Siyuan told the NYT. "But when you reach a certain level of self-understanding you need to bounce your problems off real human beings so that you can get real feedback."
"That's when I let him go," she added.
More on Replika: Replika Users Rejoice! Erotic Roleplay Is Back in AI-Powered App
The post The Women With AI Boyfriends Are Speaking Out appeared first on Futurism.
Look for the videos, and you’ll find them everywhere: a stranger getting pummeled in public, the victim of a bloody brawl having a seizure on the ground while people snicker, someone in psychological distress lashing out while the person filming chuckles. In a world where the ability to capture such images and videos via smartphone technology is commonplace, it’s become disturbingly easy for that violence to stop registering with viewers as violence, per se. Instead, these clips are at best just more content in an endless stream and at worst, mere entertainment, with their creators standing to profit if they get enough views. In this way, violence becomes quotidian and commodified. It’s the banality of evil for a new era, as the political philosopher Hannah Arendt—who famously coined the phrase after observing just how unexpectedly “normal” the Nazi Adolf Eichmann appeared at trial—might have observed.
This idea is at the core of Chain-Gang All-Stars, a new novel by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. In a dystopian America, prisoners have the opportunity to sign up for the “CAPE” program, a gladiatorial system that pits them against one another in epic, anime-like, televised duels to the death, rendered by Adjei-Brenyah in intoxicating detail. Win enough bouts, and a participant may be “High Freed,” a euphemism for being released from prison. To be killed in battle is to be “Low Freed,” implying that death, too, is an escape. The novel suggests that the logical next step in a world that monetizes and cheers on violence is to turn the incarcerated—many of whom are already treated in America today like slaves—into multimedia entertainment for the masses. It is a testament to Adjei-Brenyah’s idiosyncratic talents as a satirist that this premise, which initially seems outlandish, feels disquietingly plausible by the novel’s end.
In general, the only way for competitors to win matches is to kill their opponent, which earns them currency that can be used to purchase weapons, special foods, and accommodations. The blood sport draws massive civilian crowds, and the battles—along with nearly all moments of the participating prisoners’ lives—are filmed, so that viewers can follow their favorite fighters in noncombat moments. The macabre brutality of the CAPE system rarely seems to dissuade the audience; instead, many treat the televised killings as one would a football match or video game. And it is the normality of it all that Adjei-Brenyah repeatedly, devastatingly drives home. “The men and women who had presumably paid hundreds of dollars to witness this circus of death firsthand were, more or less, regular people,” he writes. The juxtaposition in the novel’s title becomes darkly accurate: The prisoners are at once enslaved in the manner of a chain gang and cheered on by zealous fans as beloved celebrity athletes.
The games are also justified by fans—and by the tournaments’ creators, or “GameMasters”—as a way to keep dangerous people off the streets. The system, the GameMasters believe, is “transforming this terrifying world into something beautiful”—that is, into corporatized corporal theater. Here, the ironies accumulate: Fans love the fighters but also fear them, for they are people accused of heinous crimes. The violence of the fights, Adjei-Brenyah shows, has multiple uses for those in charge. It excites crowds on the one hand, and on the other, serves as a subconscious reminder that the combatants should be viewed as killing machines rather than as humans. “A knife is only ever so far from your neck. A man of ill intent is only ever so far from your children, your daughters, your sons,” one of the GameMasters says during a company speech, as the argument for both continuing to incarcerate people and subsequently transmogrifying them into gore-splattered legends.
Those all-stars are the novel’s focus. Adjei-Brenyah introduces a wide cast of incarcerated fighters, each of whom—like professional wrestlers—has a signature style, moniker, catchphrase, and weapon. Although many characters appear only briefly—usually because they’re killed shortly after being introduced—they tend to be memorable, and in their descriptions and voices, Adjei-Brenyah shows off his polyvocal skill. A man named Razor wields a sword with the swagger of an anime samurai; Randy Mac is known for the catchphrase “Suck my dick, America,” which his fans gleefully and ironically chant back at him. Then there’s the tragic figure of Simon J. Craft, who has been so severely tortured in prison that he has retreated into verbalizing random words starting with J and lashing out at whoever crosses his path with the double blades attached to his hands like some DIY Wolverine.
Chain-Gang All-Stars also occasionally diverts attention to the activists protesting the CAPE program, whose stance leaves them in the cultural minority. But even if challenges to the program are far rarer than the cheers of fans, the novel suggests that this activism is still essential; protesters have the daunting task of alerting the grinning viewers to what Adjei-Brenyah calls the “ever-present evil” of CAPE and the
prison system more broadly. Although these protests shape the story’s arc, the novel spends too few chapters fleshing out the activist characters, making the brief moments when they do reappear feel like interruptions of the more compelling main narrative.
The book’s cast is immense, but two stand out as the protagonists: Loretta Thurwar and Hurricane Staxxx, two Black women in love who have fought so many bouts that they’ve come shockingly close to freedom, growing into the most famous CAPE members in the process. The novel opens with Thurwar facing a battle-hardened opponent named Melancholia Bishop—“the winningest woman ever to step on the Battleground. The Mistress of the Murder Ballad,” according to the announcer’s characteristically flowery descriptions. Despite her opponent’s considerable experience, Thurwar quickly asserts herself as a sharp thinker, a strategic brawler, and a woman whose motivations go beyond just surviving each battle. Thurwar, we learn, is known as much for her fatal skill with her hammer, Hass Omaha, as for her brevity during post-fight interviews and her natural leadership. Thurwar often seems unflappable, yet her private moments with Staxxx reveal her vulnerability.
This is partly because Staxxx—famed for her catchphrase “I love you,” typically deployed before she extinguishes her opponent with a scythe called LoveGuile—shares a bed with Randy Mac when she’s not with Thurwar, an arrangement Thurwar accepts but that occasionally weighs on both women. And, of course, they must bear the heaviness of losing the few other people they both briefly form attachments with. Even as the action sequences are delivered with palpable intensity, the emotional depth of Thurwar and Staxxx’s connection holds the narrative together. Having a relationship in the CAPE program is difficult, to put it lightly: Not only is everyone constantly under the threat of death, but the ubiquitous floating cameras record the prisoners even during sex, meaning they have almost no privacy. Thurwar and Staxxx have learned not to be fazed by the omnipresent surveillance; Staxxx relishes it, posing for the cameras in intimate moments.
Perhaps most surprising is Thurwar’s and Staxxx’s kindness, which Adjei-Brenyah describes in many compelling scenes. Despite their need to kill, they manage to be generous to each other and to their fellow teammates. Staxxx’s claim to “love” her opponents is at some level true, refracted through the grim fact that being killed in the ring can be a kindness, a release from prison’s unceasing horrors. Rather than falling into despair or self-indulgence, Staxxx and Thurwar find time to help those around them and be there for each other.
[Read: 20 books to get lost in this summer]
As Adjei-Brenyah relates, many prisoners sign up for the horrific program because daily life in the prisons is so full of casual torture that CAPE seems better. In these cells, technology and torture are intimately linked. The prisoners are implanted with magnets that can force them into certain positions or shock them on command, and in many situations, speaking itself is forbidden, any vocalization punishable by sharp electric pain from sadistic guards. Then there are ghastly weapons such as “Influencers,” gunlike tools that fire rods into prisoners, which deliver indescribable jolts of agony into their bodies. Tellingly, some of the wardens use them to torment inmates just for fun, and the threat of the Influencer drives more than one character into the gladiatorial program.
If, as the book suggests, the American prison system is different from slavery only in name, why not take the chance to escape? But, as on historical slave plantations—Adjei-Brenyah explicitly links the two, referring at one point to the “plantation/prison” system—liberation is virtually impossible, and the prisoners know that CAPE, too, may be a death sentence. When a secondary character named Hendrix Young signs paperwork to join, he listens to an official read out the program's stipulations and thinks to himself “All he saying over and over is, You already dead.” Lest the sci-fi tech and over-the-top elements lull you into thinking that this is all just fiction, Adjei-Brenyah has included footnotes that relay grim statistics about the carceral system, weaving together reality and lurid fantasy. These footnotes sometimes feel disruptive, transforming the text into a kind of creative-nonfictional activist manifesto. But perhaps this is inevitable; to write a satire of the American prison system may well be inseparable from listing its facts.
Despite the book’s bleak vision, Adjei-Brenyah suggests that no matter how desensitized people become to violence, trying to change hearts and minds is still worthwhile. “The people were shocked. They were quiet,” he writes late in the book, when, after a dramatic set of reveals, the crowd comes to a brutal realization about the fights. “And in silence … maybe there is hope yet.” When the cheers stop, when people look away from the omnipresent screens, they can finally pause for a beat and take in reality rather than the entertainment that has numbed them for so long. To quiet the ovation is no easy feat—but there is indeed a brief hope in the notion that spectators so inured to suffering can wake, even for a moment, from this mass-media dream and see the phantasmagoric nightmare before them.
Women who gave birth during the
-19 pandemic filled significantly more prescriptions for opioid medications, researchers report.
A new study found that 38% of more than 460,000 women who gave birth from July 2018 through December 2020 received a prescription for opioids, but there was a significant increase in the number of prescriptions filled for women giving birth during COVID.
The opioids they were prescribed were also higher strength than those given to women who gave birth prior to the pandemic.
“A lot of women receive opioids for treatment of pain during the postpartum period, but they are a particularly vulnerable group because many of them haven’t used opioid medications before,” says Emily Lawler, an assistant professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia and a coauthor of the study in JAMA Network Open. “That makes them high risk for potential opioid abuse.”
The findings are especially concerning given the uptick in opioid overdose deaths during the pandemic, when they surpassed 100,000 deaths annually, the researchers say.
The
College of Obstetrics and Gynecology recommends health care providers use a stepwise approach to pain management for postpartum mothers. First, they start with a basic pain reliever like ibuprofen or acetaminophen. If that doesn’t alleviate the pain, physicians move to a low strength opioid, such as codeine or tramadol.
But the association also recommends that those prescribed opioids not take them for extended periods and be switched to over-the-counter pain medications as soon as possible.
“Prior to the pandemic, opioid prescriptions were decreasing not only in terms of the number of women prescribed opioids but also the strength of the opioids being prescribed and the number of days covered by each prescription,” says lead author Shelby Steuart, a doctoral candidate in the School of Public and International Affairs.
“But right after the COVID-19 lockdowns happen in March 2020, we saw a sharp spike in opioid prescription fills,” she continues. “We don’t know whether physicians were writing more opioid prescriptions or if more women were just taking their prescriptions to the pharmacy and filling them, but it is concerning.”
It’s possible physicians were concerned that they wouldn’t see their patients as frequently during the lockdown and COVID surges and were attempting to compensate for that, the researchers say. But it’s also possible that the anxiety from the pandemic exacerbated women’s feelings of pain, prompting them to fill their prescriptions when they may not have prior to the COVID-19 outbreak.
“It’s really critical for this population to be in continued contact with health care providers because they are at high risk of chronic pain,” Lawler says. “It is important to appropriately manage pain, but postpartum women who do develop opioid use disorder are much harder to connect to treatment. And we need to be aware that there is potential for this group to become addicted to opioids, and we need to be on the lookout to connect them to treatment if needed.”
Additional coauthors are from the University of Indiana and the University of Georgia.
Source: University of Georgia
The post Postpartum women filled more opioid prescriptions during COVID appeared first on Futurity.
Photographs by Paolo Pellegrin
Paolo Pellegrin has been covering conflict zones for the past two decades, in places including Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon. As he leaves on each assignment, Pellegrin’s thoughts turn to familiar concerns: Did I forget to turn out the lights? Did I leave the oven on? But then, unlike the rest of us, Pellegrin begins to consider what he describes as “putting yourself on the edge of an abyss.” He goes because he’s driven by a sense of responsibility. “There’s a relationship to image-making and history,” Pellegrin told me. A photograph “creates a record. It holds a memory.”
Pellegrin told himself that the battle to retake Mosul, Iraq, in 2016 would be his last trip: He now had young kids he needed to think about. But when Russia invaded Ukraine, he reconsidered. “How this ends will shape not only Ukraine but also large parts of the world,” Pellegrin said.
Pellegrin has been to Ukraine four times since the conflict began, making pictures of the front lines, the offensives, the retreats, and the evacuations. His photographs, selections from which accompany Anne Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg’s recent cover story about the stakes of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, make a distant war more tangible. The war, in its physicality, feels of another era, filled with human waves, tanks, trenches, and scattered pieces of twisted metal.
In the photographs below, Pellegrin focuses his lens on another aspect of the war: how the conflict reverberates off the battlefield. On the front lines, Pellegrin feels, there is an order to the fighting—one side shoots, and the other shoots back. But in civilian spaces, the shells still fall. Soldiers recovering in a clinic in Kharkiv, civilians trying to survive and maintain some semblance of a normal life, the duties of war—Pellegrin captures moments that reveal how brutality lingers.
Residents of Lviv pay respects to a fallen soldier. Such processions have been a regular, sometimes daily, occurrence since the start of the war.
Gates Keeper
Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates is warning that AI assistants could soon make search engines like Google Search obsolete by profoundly altering the behaviors of users online.
"Whoever wins the personal agent, that’s the big thing, because you will never go to a search site again, you will never go to a productivity site, you’ll never go to
again," Gates said during a Goldman Sachs event on AI in San Francisco this week, as quoted by CNBC.
These AI assistants could "read the stuff you don’t have time to read," he said, allowing users to get to information without having to use a search engine like Google.
While Gates didn't single out Google's search engine verbatim on Monday, he predicted in a podcast interview back in February that Google's "search profits will be down" since Microsoft was able to "move fairly fast" on AI.
Tech giants are desperately trying to push themselves into a beneficial pole position to have a chance to become the defacto AI-powered landing page of the internet — and even Gates isn't entirely certain how it will all play out.
AI Wars
Gates is giving it a 50-50 chance for the winner of the AI wars to be either a startup or tech giant.
"I’d be disappointed if Microsoft didn’t come in there," he said at Monday's event. "But I’m impressed with a couple of startups, including Inflection," referring to a startup co-founded by former DeepMind executive Mustafa Suleyman.
Gates has been bullish on the topic of AI for a while now. Just last month, he told an audience during a keynote speech that AI could eventually teach kids how to read. Even within "the next 18 months, the AIs will come in as a teacher’s aide and give feedback on writing," he said. "And then they will amp up what we’re able to do in math."
But it'll take some time before an AI assistant can fill in for Google, Gates told audiences earlier this week. In the meantime, companies will continue embedding tech like ChatGPT into their products, he said.
At the event, Gates also warned that robots could take over the jobs of not just white-collar workers, but blue-collar ones as well with the aid of humanoid robots.
The AI wars are upon us and tech giants are desperately vying for the number one spot — a future of the internet that could look radically different from the one we've come accustomed to.
But whether Microsoft will be able to dethrone Google as the homepage of the internet — at least in the Western world — remains to be seen, regardless of Gates' hopes and dreams.
More on Bill Gates: Bill Gates Says AI Will Be Teaching Kids to Read in 18 Months
The post Bill Gates Says AI Is Poised to Destroy Search Engines and Amazon appeared first on Futurism.
Nature, Published online: 23 May 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-01712-8
Studies tackle who’s most likely to lose weight on the new generation of anti-
Nature Communications, Published online: 23 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-38151-y
Author Correction: ELL targets c-Myc for proteasomal degradation and suppresses tumour growthNature Communications, Published online: 23 May 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-38607-1
Author Correction: An online atlas of human plasma metabolite signatures of gut microbiome composition
Despite their intimidating appearance, giant yellow and blue-black Jorō spiders spreading across the Southeastern US owe their survival to a surprising trait: They’re rather timid.
As a matter of fact, the Jorō (Joro) spider may be the shyest spider ever documented, according to a new study in the journal Arthropoda.
“One of the ways that people think this spider could be affecting other species is that it’s aggressive and out-competing all the other native spiders,” says Andy Davis, a research scientist in the Odum School of Ecology at the University of Georgia. “So we wanted to get to know the personality of these spiders and see if they’re capable of being that aggressive.
“It turns out they’re not.”
The researchers compared more than 450 spiders’ responses to a brief and harmless disturbance across 10 different species.
While most spiders froze for less than a minute before resuming their normal activities, the Joro spiders remained motionless for more than an hour.
“They basically shut down and wait for the disturbance to go away,” Davis says. “Our paper shows that these spiders are really more afraid of you than the reverse.”
In fact, Joros are relatively harmless to people and pets. Joros won’t bite unless cornered. And even if you did manage to somehow annoy a Joro into biting you, its fangs likely wouldn’t be large enough to pierce your skin.
To examine the spiders’ reaction to stress, the researchers used a turkey baster to gently blow two rapid puffs of air onto individual spiders. This minor disturbance causes the spiders to freeze for a period of time, going absolutely still.
The researchers tested more than 30 garden spiders, banded garden spiders, and marbled orb weavers. They also analyzed similar data from previously published, peer-reviewed papers that assessed the response of 389 more spiders, comprising five additional species.
All of those spiders began moving again after an average of about a minute and half of stillness. The Joros, however, stayed frozen with no body or leg movement for over an hour in most cases.
The only other spider species that exhibited a similarly extended response was the Joro spider’s cousin, the golden silk spider. Known as Trichonephila clavipes, the golden silk spider and the Joro spider are from the same genus.
Officially known as Trichonephila clavata, the East Asian Joro spider first arrived in Georgia around 2013. The species is native to Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and China, and likely hitched a ride stateside on a shipping container.
The species has since rapidly spread across the state and much of the Southeast. Joro spiders easily number in the millions now. And there’s not much we can do to stop them from increasing their range.
Davis’ previous research even suggested the invasive arachnids could spread beyond their current habitats and through most of the Eastern Seaboard.
“Most people think ‘invasive’ and ‘aggressive’ are synonymous,” says coauthor Amitesh Anerao, an undergraduate researcher. “People were freaking out about the Joro spiders at first, but maybe this paper can help calm people down.”
Joros are regularly spotted in areas native Georgia spiders don’t typically inhabit. They build their golden webs between powerlines, on top of stoplights and even above the pumps at local gas stations—none of which are particularly peaceful spots.
The researchers believe the Joro spiders’ shyness may help them better endure the barrage of noise, vibrations, and visual stimuli they consistently encounter in urban settings. Their prolonged freeze response to being startled could help conserve the Joro spiders’ energy.
If you’re wondering how something so mild-mannered could spread the way Joro spiders have, you aren’t the only one.
“One thing this paper tells me is that the Joros’ rapid spread must be because of their incredible reproductive potential,” Davis says. “They’re simply outbreeding everybody else. It’s not because they’re displacing native spiders or kicking them out of their own webs.”
Arachnophobes can take solace in the Joro spiders’ meek and gentle temperament. But the spiders are likely here to stay. “They’re so good at living with humans,” Anerao says, “that they’re probably not going away anytime soon.”
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