In the years since ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022, it’s been hard not to get swept up in feelings of euphoria or dread about the looming impacts of generative AI. This reaction has been fueled, in part, by the confident declarations of tech CEOs, who have veered toward increasingly bombastic rhetoric. “AI is starting to…
Last month, a 22-year-old entrepreneur named Emil Barr published a Wall Street Journal op-ed boasting a provocative title: “‘Work-Life Balance’ Will Keep You Mediocre.” He opens with a spicy take: “I’m 22 and I’ve built two companies that together are valued at more than $20 million…When people ask how I did it, the answer isn’t…
In the years since ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022, it’s been hard not to get swept up in feelings of euphoria or dread about the looming impacts of generative AI. This reaction has been fueled, in part, by the confident declarations of tech CEOs, who have veered toward increasingly bombastic rhetoric. “AI is starting to…
A few days ago, I went to Disneyland. I had been invited to Anaheim to give a speech about my books, and my wife and I decided to use the opportunity to take our boys on an early summer visit to the supposed happiest place on earth. As long-time listeners of my podcast know, I…
A reader recently sent me a Substack post they thought I might like. “I bought my kids an old-school phone to keep smartphones out of their hands while still letting them chat with friends,” the post’s author, Priscilla Harvey, writes. “But it’s turned into the sweetest, most unexpected surprise: my son’s new daily conversations with…
In the wake of my recent (and inaugural) visit to Disneyland, I read Richard Snow’s history of the park, Disney’s Land. Early in the book, Snow tells a story that I hadn’t heard before. It fascinated me—not just for its details, but also, as I’ll soon elaborate, for its potential relevance to our current moment.…
I want to present you with two narratives about AI. Both of them are about using this technology to automate computer programming, but they point toward two very different conclusions. The first narrative notes that Large Language Models (LLMs) are exceptionally well-suited for coding because source code, at its core, is just very well-structured text,…
Most summers, my family and I retreat to New England for much of July. From a professional perspective, I see this as an exercise in seasonality (to use a term from my book Slow Productivity), a way to recharge and recenter the creative efforts that sustain my work. This year, I needed all the help…
In a recent New Yorker review of Matt Richtel’s new book, How We Grow Up, Molly Fischer effectively summarizes the current debate about the impact phones and social media are having on teens. Fischer focuses, in particular, on Jon Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation, which has, to date, spent 66 weeks on the Times bestseller list. “Haidt points to a selection of statistics…
Last fall, I published a New Yorker essay titled, “What Kind of Writer is ChatGPT?”. My goal for the piece was to better understand how undergraduate and graduate college students were using AI to help with their writing assignments. At the time, there was concern that these tools would become plagiarism machines. (“AI seems almost…
One of the topics I’ve returned to repeatedly in my work is the intersection of smartphones and children (see, for example, my two New Yorker essays on the topic, or my 2023 presentation that surveys the history of the relevant research literature). Given this interest, I was, of course, pleased to see an important new…
In the spring of 2019, while on tour for my book Digital Minimalism, I stopped by the Manhattan production offices of Brian Koppelman to record an episode of his podcast, The Moment. We had a good conversation covering a lot of territory. But there was one point, around the twenty-minute mark, where things got mildly…
Last month, Anthropic released a safety report about one of its most powerful chatbots, Claude Opus 4. The report attracted attention for its description of an unsettling experiment. Researchers asked Claude to act as a virtual assistant for a fictional company. To help guide its decisions, they presented it with a collection of emails that…
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