Apple AirPods : a gateway hearing aid

When the US Food and Drug Administration approved over-the-counter hearing-aid software for Apple’s AirPods Pro in September 2024, with a device price point right around $200, I was excited. I have mild to medium hearing loss and tinnitus, and my everyday programmed hearing aids cost just over $2,000—a lower-cost option I chose after my audiologist wanted to put me in a $5,000 pair.

Health insurance in the US does not generally cover the cost of hearing aids, and the vast majority of people who use them pay out of pocket for the devices along with any associated maintenance. Ninety percent of the hearing-aid market is concentrated in the hands of a few companies, so there’s little competitive pricing. The typical patient heads to an audiology clinic, takes a hearing test, gets an audiogram (a graph plotting decibel levels against frequencies to show how loud various sounds need to be for you to hear them), and then receives a recommendation—an interaction that can end up feeling like a high-pressure sales pitch. 

Prices should be coming down: In October 2022, the FDA approved the sale of over-the-counter hearing aids without a prescription or audiology exam. These options start around $200, but they are about as different from prescription hearing aids as drugstore reading glasses are from prescription lenses. 

Beginning with the AirPods Pro 2, Apple is offering something slightly different: regular earbuds (useful in all the usual ways) with many of the same features as OTC hearing aids. I’m thrilled that a major tech company has entered this field. 

The most important features for mild hearing loss are programmability, Bluetooth functionality, and the ability to feed sound to both ears. These are features many hearing aids have, but they are less robust and reliable in some of the OTC options. 

COURTESY OF APPLE

The AirPods Pro “hearing health experience” lets you take a hearing test through the AirPods themselves with your cell phone; your phone then uses that data to program the hearing aids. No trip to the audiologist, no waiting room where a poster reminds you that hearing loss is associated with earlier cognitive decline, and no low moment afterward when you grapple with the cost.

I desperately wanted the AirPods Pro 2 to be really good, but they’re simply okay. They provide an opportunity for those with mild hearing loss to see if some of the functions of a hearing aid might be useful, but there are some drawbacks. Prescription hearing aids help me with tinnitus; I found that after a day of wear, the AirPods exacerbated it. Functionality to manage tinnitus might be a feature that Apple could and would want to pursue in the future, as an estimated 10% to 15% of the adult population experiences it. The devices also plug your whole ear canal, which can be uncomfortable and even cause swimmer’s ear after hours of use. Some people may feel odd wearing such bulky devices all the time—though they could make you look more like someone signaling “Don’t talk to me, I’m listening to my music” than someone who needs hearing aids.

Most of the other drawbacks are shared by other devices within their class of OTC hearing aids and even some prescription hearing aids: factors like poor sound quality, inadequate discernment between sounds, and difficulties with certain sound environments, like crowded rooms. Still, while the AirPods are not as good as my budget hearing aid that costs 10 times more, there’s incredible potential here.

Ashley Shew is the author of Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement (2023). 

Material Cultures looks to the past to build the future

Despite decades of green certifications, better material sourcing, and the use of more sustainable materials such as mass timber, the built environment is still responsible for a third of global emissions worldwide. According to a 2024 UN report, the building sector has fallen “significantly behind on progress” toward becoming more sustainable. Changing the way we erect and operate buildings remains key to even approaching climate goals. 

“As soon as you set out and do something differently in construction, you are constantly bumping your head against the wall,” says Paloma Gormley, a director of the London-based design and research nonprofit Material Cultures. “You can either stop there or take a step back and try to find a way around it.”

Gormley has been finding a “way around it” by systematically exploring how tradition can be harnessed in new ways to repair what she has dubbed the “oil vernacular”—the contemporary building system shaped not by local, natural materials but by global commodities and plastic products made largely from fossil fuels.

Though she grew up in a household rich in art and design—she’s the daughter of the famed British sculptor Antony Gormley—she’s quick to say she’s far from a brilliant maker and more of a “bodger,” a term that means someone who does work that’s botched or shoddy. 

Improviser or DIYer might be more accurate. One of her first bits of architecture was a makeshift home built on the back of a truck she used to tour around England one summer in her 20s. The work of her first firm, Practice Architecture, which she cofounded after graduating from the University of Cambridge in 2009, was informed by London’s DIY subcultures and informal art spaces. She says these scenes “existed in the margins and cracks between things, but in which a lot felt possible.” 

Frank’s Café, a bar and restaurant she built in 2009 on the roof of a parking garage in Peckham that hosted a sculpture park, was constructed from ratchet straps, scaffold boards, and castoffs she’d source from lumberyards and transport on the roof rack of an old Volvo. It was the first of a series of cultural and social spaces she and her partner Lettice Drake created using materials both low-budget and local. 

Material Cultures grew out of connections Gormley made while she was teaching at London Metropolitan University. In 2019, she was a teaching assistant along with Summer Islam, who was friends with George Massoud, both architects and partners in the firm Study Abroad and advocates of more socially conscious design. The trio had a shared interest in sustainability and building practices, as well as a frustration with the architecture world’s focus on improving sustainability through high-tech design. Instead of using modern methods to build more efficient commercial and residential spaces from carbon-intensive materials like steel, they thought, why not revisit first principles? Build with locally sourced, natural materials and you don’t have to worry about making up a carbon deficit in the first place. 

HENRY WOIDE/COURTESY OF MATERIAL CULTURES

OSKAR PROCTOR

As many other practitioners look to artificial intelligence and other high-tech approaches to building, Material Cultures has always focused on sustainability, finding creative ways to turn local materials into new buildings. And the three of them don’t just design and build. They team up with traditional craft experts to explore the potential of materials like reeds and clay, and techniques like thatching and weaving. 

More than any one project, Gormley, Islam, and Massoud are perhaps best known for their meditation on the subject of how architects work. Published in 2022, Material Reform: Building for a Post-Carbon Future is a pocket-size book that drills into materials and methodologies to suggest a more thoughtful, ecological architecture.

“There is a huge amount of technological knowledge and intelligence in historic, traditional, vernacular ways of doing things that’s been evolved over millennia, not just the last 100 years,” Gormley says. “We’re really about trying to tap into that.”

One of Material Cultures’ early works, Flat House, a home built in 2019 in Cambridgeshire, England, with pressed panels of hemp grown in the surrounding fields, was meant as an exploration of what kind of building could be made from what a single farm could produce. Gormley was there from the planting of the seeds to the harvesting of the hemp plants to the completion of construction. 

“It was incredible understanding that buildings could be part of these natural cycles,” she says. 

Clearfell House, a timber A-frame cabin tucked into a clearing in the Dalby Forest in North Yorkshire, England, exemplifies the firm’s obsession with elevating humble materials and vernacular techniques. Every square inch of the house, which was finished in late 2024 as part of a construction class Material Cultures’ architects taught at Central Saint Martins design school in London, emerged from extensive research into British timber, the climate crisis, and how forestry is changing. That meant making the frame from local ash and larch, two species of wood specifically chosen because they were affected by climate change, and avoiding the use of factory-farmed lumber. The modular system used for the structure was made to be replicated at scale.  

“I find it rare that architecture offices have such a clear framing and mission,” says Andreas Lang, head of the Saint Martins architecture program. “Emerging practices often become client-dependent. For [Material Cultures], the client is maybe the planet.”

Material Cultures fits in with the boom in popularity for more sustainable materials, waste-minimizing construction, and panelized building using straw and hemp, says Michael Burchert, a German expert on decarbonized buildings. “People are grabbing the good stuff from the hippies at the moment,” he says. Regulation has started to follow: France recently mandated that new public buildings be constructed with 50% timber or other biological material, and Denmark’s construction sector has embarked on a project, Pathways to Biobased Construction, to promote use of nature-based products in new building.

Burchert appreciates the way the firm melds theory and practice. “We have academia, and academia is full of papers,” he says. “We need makers.” 

Over the last several years, Gormley and her cofounders have developed a portfolio of work that rethinks construction supply chains and stays grounded in social impact. The just-finished Wolves Lane Centre, a $2.4 million community center in North London run by a pair of groups that work on food and racial justice, didn’t just reflect Material Cultures’ typical focus on bio-based materials—in this case, local straw, lime, and timber. 

LUKE O’DONOVAN/COURTESY OF MATERIAL CULTURES

LUKE O’DONOVAN/COURTESY OF MATERIAL CULTURES

For Wolves Lane Centre, a $2.4 million community facility for groups working on food and racial justice, expert plasterers and specialists in straw-bale construction were brought in so their processes could be shared and learned.

LUKE O’DONOVAN/COURTESY OF MATERIAL CULTURES

It was a project of self-determination and learning, says Gormley. Expert plasterers and specialists in straw-bale construction were brought in so the processes could be shared and learned. Introducing this kind of teaching into the construction process was quite time-consuming and, Gormley says, was as expensive as using contemporary techniques, if not more so. But the added value was worth it. 

“The people who become the custodians of these buildings then have the skills to maintain and repair, as well as evolve, the site over time,” she says. 

As Burchert puts it, science fiction tends to show a future built of concrete and steel; Material Cultures instead offers something natural, communal, and innovative, a needed paradigm shift. And it’s increasingly working on a larger scale. The Phoenix, a forthcoming low-carbon development in the southern English city of Lewes that’s being developed by a former managing director for Greenpeace, will use the firm’s designs for 70 of its 700 planned homes. 

The project Gormley may be most excited about is an interdisciplinary school Material Cultures is creating north of London: a 500-acre former farm in Essex that will be a living laboratory bridging the firm’s work in supply chains, materials science, and construction. The rural site for the project, which has the working title Land Lab, was deliberately chosen as a place where those connections would be inherent, Gormley says. 

The Essex project advances the firm’s larger mission. As Gormley, Massoud, and Islam advise in their book, “Hold a vision of a radically different world in your mind while continuing to act in the world as it is, persisting in the project of making changes that are within the scope of action.” 

Patrick Sisson, a Chicago expat living in Los Angeles, covers technology and urbanism.

Indigenous knowledge meets artificial intelligence

There is no word for art in most Native American languages. Instead, the closest terms speak not to objecthood but to action and intention. In Lakota, “wówačhiŋtȟaŋka” implies deep thought or reflection, while “wóčhekiye” suggests offering or prayer. Art is not separate from life; it is ceremony, instruction, design. Like architecture or code, it carries knowledge and enacts responsibility. Its power lies not in being preserved or displayed but in how it moves, teaches, and connects through use—principles that challenge the tech industry’s assumptions about intelligence and interaction.

A new vanguard of Native artists—Suzanne Kite (Oglala Lakota), Raven Chacon (Diné), and Nicholas Galanin (Tlingít)—are building on this principle. They are united not by stereotypical weaving and carving or revanchist critique of Silicon Valley, but through their rejection of extractive data models in favor of relationship-based systems. These technologists put the human-tech relationship at the center of their work.

Suzanne Kite’s AI art installations, for example, model a Lakota framework of data sovereignty: intelligence that emerges only through reciprocal, consensual interaction. Unlike systems that assume user consent via opaque terms of service, her kinetic machines require the viewer’s physical presence—and give something back in return. 

“It’s my data. It’s my training set. I know exactly what I did to train it. It’s not a large model but a small and intimate one,” Kite says. “I’m not particularly interested in making the most technologically advanced anything. I’m an artist; I don’t make tech demos. So the complexity needs to come at many layers—not just the technical.”

Where Kite builds working prototypes of consent-based AI, other artists in this cohort explore how sound, robotics, and performance can confront the logic of automation, surveillance, and extraction. But Native people have never been separate from technology. The land, labor, and lifeways that built America’s infrastructure—including its tech—are Indigenous. The question isn’t whether Native cultures are contributing now, but why they were ever considered separate. 

Native technologies reject the false binaries foundational to much Western innovation. These artists ask a more radical question: What if intelligence couldn’t be gathered until a relationship had been established? What if the default were refusal, not extraction? These artists aren’t asking to be included in today’s systems. They’re building what should come next.

Suzanne Kite

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

Raven Chacon

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

Nicholas Galanin

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

Petala Ironcloud is a California-born Lakota/Dakota and Jewish writer and textile artist based in New York.

3 things Rhiannon Williams is into right now

The last good Instagram account

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that social media is a Bad Vibe. Thankfully, there is still one Instagram account worth following that’s just as incisive, funny, and scathing today as when it was founded back in 2016: Every Outfit (@everyoutfitonsatc). Originally conceived as an homage to Sex and the City’s iconic fashion, Every Outfit has since evolved into a wider cultural critique and spawned a podcast of the same name that I love listening to while running. Sex and the City may be over, but Every Outfit is forever.

Glorious Exploits, by Ferdia Lennon

Glorious Exploits is one of those rare books that manage to pull off being both laugh-out-loud funny and deeply moving, which is no mean feat. Set in ancient Sicily, it tells the story of unemployed potters Lampo and Gelon’s grand plan to stage the Greek tragedy Medea with a cast of defeated Athenian soldiers who’ve been imprisoned in quarries on the outskirts of Syracuse. The ancient backdrop combined with the characters’ contemporary Irish dialogue (the author was born in Dublin) makes it unlike anything I’ve ever read before; it’s so ambitious it’s hard to believe it’s Lennon’s debut novel. Completely engrossing.

Life drawing

The depressing wave of AI-generated art that’s flooded the internet in recent years has inspired me to explore the exact opposite and make art the old-fashioned way. My art teacher in college always said the best way to learn the correct proportions of the human body was to draw it in person, so I’ve started attending classes near where I live in London. Pencil and paper are generally my medium of choice. Spending a few hours interpreting what’s in front of you in your own artistic style is really rewarding—and has the added bonus of being completely screen-free. I can’t recommend it enough.

How a 30-year-old techno-thriller predicted our digital isolation

In April, Mark Zuckerberg, as tech billionaires are so fond of doing these days, pontificated at punishing length on a podcast. In the interview, he addressed America’s loneliness epidemic: “The average American has—I think it’s fewer than three friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it’s like 15 friends or something, right?”

Before you’ve had a moment to register the ominous way in which he frames human connection in such bleak economic terms, he offers his solution to the loneliness epidemic: AI friends. Ideally AI friends his company generates.

“It’s like I’m not even me anymore.”
—Angela Bennett, The Net (1995)

Thirty years ago, Irwin Winkler’s proto–cyber thriller, The Net, was released. It was 1995, commonly regarded as the year Hollywood discovered the internet. Sandra Bullock played a social recluse and computer nerd for hire named Angela Bennett, who unwittingly uncovers a sinister computer security conspiracy. She soon finds her life turned upside down as the conspiracists begin systematically destroying her credibility and reputation. Her job, home, finances, and very identity are seemingly erased with some judicial tweaks to key computer records.

Bennett is uniquely—conveniently, perhaps—well positioned for this identity annihilation. Her mother, in the throes of dementia, no longer recognizes her; she works from home for clients who have never met her; her social circle is limited to an online chat room; she orders takeout from Pizza.net; her neighbors don’t even know what she looks like. Her most reliable companion is the screen in front of her. A wild, unimaginable scenario that I’m sure none of us can relate to.

“Just think about it. Our whole world is sitting there on a computer. It’s in the computer, everything: your DMV records, your Social Security, your credit cards, your medical records. It’s all right there. Everyone is stored in there. It’s like this little electronic shadow on each and every one of us, just begging for someone to screw with, and you know what? They’ve done it to me, and you know what? They’re gonna do it to you.”
—Angela Bennett, The Net

While the villain of The Net is ultimately a nefarious cybersecurity software company, the film’s preoccupying fear is much more fundamental: If all of our data is digitized, what happens if the people with access to that information tamper with it? Or weaponize it against us? 

This period of Hollywood’s flirtation with the internet is often referred to as the era of the technophobic thriller, but that’s a surface-level misreading. Techno-skeptic might be more accurate. These films were broadly positive and excited about new technology; it almost always played a role in how the hero saved the day. Their bigger concern was with the humans who had ultimate control of these tools, and what oversight and restrictions we should place on them.

In 2025, however, the most prescient part of The Net is Angela Bennett’s digital alienation. What was originally a series of plausible enough contrivances to make the theft of her identity more believable is now just part of our everyday lives. We all bank, shop, eat, work, and socialize without necessarily seeing another human being in person. And we’ve all been through covid lockdowns where that isolation was actively encouraged. For a whole generation of young people who lived through that, socializing face to face is not second nature. In 2023, the World Health Organization declared loneliness to be a pressing global health threat, estimating that one in four older adults experience social isolation and between 5% and 15% of adolescents experience loneliness. In the US, social isolation may threaten public health more seriously than obesity. 

The Net appeared at a time when the internet was only faintly understood as the new Wild West … In that sense, it remains a fascinating time capsule of a moment when the possibilities to come felt endless, the outlook cautiously optimistic.

We also spend increasing amounts of time looking at our phones, where finely tuned algorithms aggressively lobby for more and more of our ad-revenue-­generating attention. As Bennett warns: “Our whole lives are on the computer, and they knew that I could be vanished. They knew that nobody would care, that nobody would understand.” In this sense, in 2025 we are all Angela Bennett. As Bennett’s digital alienation makes her more vulnerable to pernicious actors, so too are we increasingly at risk from those who don’t have, and have never had, our best interests at heart. 

To blame technology entirely for a rise in loneliness—as many policymakers are doing—would be a mistake. While it is unquestionably playing a part in exacerbating the problem, its outsize role in our lives has always reflected larger underlying factors. In Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Modern World (2024), the journalist Dan Hancox examines the ways in which crowds have been demonized and othered by those in power and suggests that our alienation is much more structural: “Whether through government cuts or concessions to the expansive ambitions of private enterprise, a key reason we have all become a bit more crowd-shy in recent decades is the prolonged, top-down assault on public space and the wider public realm—what are sometimes called the urban commons. From properly funded libraries to pleasant, open parks and squares, free or affordable sports and leisure facilities, safe, accessible and cheap public transport, comfortable street furniture and free public toilets, and a vibrant, varied, uncommodified social and cultural life—all the best things about city life fall under the heading of the public realm, and all of them facilitate and support happy crowds rather than sad, alienated, stay-at-home loners.”

Nearly half a century ago Margaret Thatcher laid out the neoliberal consensus that would frame the next decades of individualism: “There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first.” 

TOM HUMBERSTONE

In keeping with that philosophy, social connectivity has been outsourced to tech companies for which the attention economy is paramount. “The Algo” is our new, capricious god. If your livelihood depends on engagement, the temptation is to stop thinking about human connection when you post, and to think more about what will satisfy The Algo to ensure a good harvest. 

How much will you trust an AI chatbot powered by Meta to be your friend? Answers to this may vary. Even if you won’t, other people are already making close connections with “AI companions” or “falling in love” with ChatGPT. The rise of “cognitive offloading”—of people asking AI to do their critical thinking for them—is already well underway, with many high school and college students admitting to a deep reliance on the technology. 

Beyond the obvious concern that AI “friends” are hallucinating, unthinking, obsequious algorithms that will never challenge you in the way a real friend might, it’s also worth remembering who AI actually works for. Recently Elon Musk’s own AI chatbot, Grok, was given new edicts that caused it to cast doubt on the Holocaust and talk about “white genocide” in response to unrelated prompts—a reminder, if we needed it, that these systems are never neutral, never apolitical, and always at the command of those with their hands on the code. 

I’m fairly lucky. I live with my partner and have a decent community of friends. But I work from home and can spend the majority of the day not talking to anyone. I’m not immune to feeling isolated, anxious, and powerless as I stare unblinking at my news feed. I think we all feel it. We are all Angela Bennett. Weaponizing that alienation, as the antagonists of The Net do, can of course be used for identity theft. But it can also have much more deleterious applications: Our loneliness can be manipulated to make us consume more, work longer, turn against ourselves and each other. AI “friendships,” if engaged with uncritically, are only going to supercharge this disaffection and the ways in which it can be abused.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We can withhold our attention, practice healthier screen routines, limit our exposure to doomscrolling, refuse to engage with energy-guzzling AI, delete our accounts. But, crucially, we can also organize collectively IRL: join a union or a local club, ask our friends if they need to talk. Hopelessness is what those in power want us to feel, so resist it.

The Net appeared at a time when the internet was only faintly understood as the new Wild West. Before the dot-com boom and bust, before Web 2.0, before the walled gardens and the theory of a “dead internet.” In that sense, it remains a fascinating time capsule of a moment when the possibilities to come felt endless, the outlook cautiously optimistic.

We can also see The Net’s influence in modern screen-life films like Searching, Host, Unfriended, and The Den. But perhaps—hopefully—its most enduring legacy will be inviting us to go outside, touch grass, talk to another human being, and organize. 

“Find the others.”
—Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human (2019)

Tom Humberstone is a comic artist and illustrator based in Edinburgh.

The quest to defend against tech in intimate partner violence

After Gioia had her first child with her then husband, he installed baby monitors throughout their Massachusetts home—to “watch what we were doing,” she says, while he went to work. She’d turn them off; he’d get angry. By the time their third child turned seven, Gioia and her husband had divorced, but he still found ways to monitor her behavior. One Christmas, he gave their youngest a smartwatch. Gioia showed it to a tech-savvy friend, who found that the watch had a tracking feature turned on. It could be turned off only by the watch’s owner—her ex.

“What am I supposed to tell my daughter?” says Gioia, who is going by a pseudonym in this story out of safety concerns. “She’s so excited but doesn’t realize [it’s] a monitoring device for him to see where we are.” In the end, she decided not to confiscate the watch. Instead, she told her daughter to leave it at home whenever they went out together, saying that this way it wouldn’t get lost. 

Gioia says she has informed a family court of this and many other instances in which her ex has used or appeared to use technology to stalk her, but so far this hasn’t helped her get full custody of her children. The court’s failure to recognize these tech-facilitated tactics for maintaining power and control has left her frustrated to the point where she yearns for visible bruises. “I wish he was breaking my arms and punching me in the face,” she says, “because then people could see it.”

People I spoke with for this article described combating tech-facilitated abuse as playing “whack-a-mole.” Just as you figure out how to alert people to smartphone location sharing, enter smart cars.

This sentiment is unfortunately common among people experiencing what’s become known as TFA, or tech-­facilitated abuse. Defined by the National Network to End Domestic Violence as “the use of digital tools, online platforms, or electronic devices to control, harass, monitor, or harm someone,” these often invisible or below-the-radar methods include using spyware and hidden cameras; sharing intimate images on social media without consent; logging into and draining a partner’s online bank account; and using device-based location tracking, as Gioia’s ex did with their daughter’s smartwatch.

Because technology is so ubiquitous, TFA occurs in most cases of intimate partner violence. And those whose jobs entail protecting victims and survivors and holding abusive actors accountable struggle to get a handle on this multi­faceted problem. An Australian study from October 2024, which drew on in-depth interviews with victims and survivors of TFA, found a “considerable gap” in the understanding of TFA among frontline workers like police and victim service providers, with the result that police repeatedly dismissed TFA reports and failed to identify such incidents as examples of intimate partner violence. The study also identified a significant shortage of funding for specialists—that is, computer scientists skilled in conducting safety scans on the devices of people experiencing TFA. 

The dearth of understanding is particularly concerning because keeping up with the many faces of tech-facilitated abuse requires significant expertise and vigilance. As internet-connected cars and homes become more common and location tracking is increasingly normalized, novel opportunities are emerging to use technology to stalk and harass. In reporting this piece, I heard chilling tales of abusers who remotely locked partners in their own “smart homes,” sometimes turning up the heat for added torment. One woman who fled her abusive partner found an ominous message when she opened her Netflix account miles away: “Bitch I’m Watching You” spelled out where the names of the accounts’ users should be. 

Despite the range of tactics, a 2022 survey of TFA-focused studies across a number of English-speaking countries found that the results readily map onto the Power and Control Wheel, a tool developed in Duluth, Minnesota, in the 1980s that categorizes the all-encompassing ways abusive partners exert power and control over victims: economically, emotionally, through threats, using children, and more. Michaela Rogers, the lead author of the study and a senior lecturer at the University of Sheffield in the UK, says she noted “paranoia, anxiety, depression, trauma and PTSD, low self-esteem … and self-harm” among TFA survivors in the wake of abuse that often pervaded every aspect of their lives.

This kind of abuse is taxing and tricky to resolve alone. Service providers and victim advocates strive to help, but many lack tech skills, and they can’t stop tech companies from bringing products to market. Some work with those companies to help create safeguards, but there are limits to what businesses can do to hold abusive actors accountable. To establish real guardrails and dole out serious consequences, robust legal frameworks are needed. 

It’s been slow work, but there have been concerted efforts to address TFA at each of these levels in the past couple of years. Some US states have passed laws against using smart car technology or location trackers such as Apple AirTags for stalking and harassment. Tech companies, including Apple and Meta, have hired people with experience in victim services to guide development of product safeguards, and advocates for victims and survivors are seeking out more specialized tech education. 

But the ever-evolving nature of technology makes it nearly impossible to create a permanent fix. People I spoke with for this article described the effort as playing “whack-a-mole.” Just as you figure out how to alert people to smartphone location sharing, enter smart cars. Outlaw AirTag stalking and a newer, more effective tool appears that can legally track your ex. That’s why groups that uniquely address TFA, like the Clinic to End Tech Abuse (CETA) at Cornell Tech in New York City, are working to create permanent infrastructure. A problem that has typically been seen as a side focus for service organizations can finally get the treatment it deserves as a ubiquitous and potentially life-endangering aspect of intimate partner violence.  

Volunteer tech support

CETA saw its first client seven years ago. In a small white room on Cornell Tech’s Roosevelt Island campus, two computer scientists sat down with someone whose abuser had been accessing the photos on their iPhone. The person didn’t know how this was happening. 

“We worked with our client for about an hour and a half,” says one of the scientists, Thomas Ristenpart, “and realized it was probably an iCloud Family Sharing issue.”

At the time, CETA was one of just two clinics in the country created to address TFA (the other being the Technology Enabled Coercive Control Clinic in Seattle), and it remains on the cutting edge of the issue. 

Picture a Venn diagram, with one circle representing computer scientists and the other service providers for domestic violence victims. It’s practically two separate circles, with CETA occupying a thin overlapping slice. Tech experts are much more likely to be drawn to profitable companies or research institutions than social-work nonprofits, so it’s unexpected that a couple of academic researchers identified TFA as a problem and chose to dedicate their careers to combating it. Their work has won results, but the learning curve was steep. 

CETA grew out of an interest in measuring the “internet spyware software ecosystem” exploited in intimate partner violence, says Ristenpart. He and cofounder Nicola Dell initially figured they could help by building a tool that could scan phones for intrusive software. They quickly realized that this alone wouldn’t solve the problem—and could even compromise people’s safety if done carelessly, since it could alert abusers that their surveillance had been detected and was actively being thwarted.

ONUR BINAY/UNSPLASH

Instead, Dell and Ristenpart studied the dynamics of coercive control. They conducted about 14 focus groups with professionals who worked daily with victims and survivors. They connected with organizations like the Anti-Violence Project and New York’s Family Justice Centers to get referrals. With the covid-19 pandemic, CETA went virtual and stayed that way. Its services now resemble “remote tech support,” Dell says. A handful of volunteers, many of whom work in Big Tech, receive clients’ intake information and guide them through processes for stopping unwanted location sharing, for example, on their devices.

Remote support has sufficed because abusers generally aren’t carrying out the type of sophisticated attack that can be foiled only by disassembling a device. “For the most part, people are using standard tools in the way that they were designed to be used,” says Dell. For example, someone might throw an AirTag into a stroller to keep track of its whereabouts (and those of the person pushing it), or act as the admin of a shared online bank account. 

Though CETA stands out as a tech-­centric service organization for survivors, anti-domestic-violence groups have been encountering and combating TFA for decades. When Cindy Southworth started her career in the domestic violence field in the 1990s, she heard of abusers doing rough location tracking using car odometers—the mileage could suggest, for instance, that a driver pretending to set out for the supermarket had instead left town to seek support. Later, when Southworth joined the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence, the advocacy community was looking at caller ID as “not only an incredibly powerful tool for survivors to be able to see who’s calling,” she recalls, “but also potentially a risky technology, if an abuser could see.” 

As technology evolved, the ways abusers took advantage evolved too. Realizing that the advocacy community “was not up on tech,” Southworth founded the National Network to End Domestic Violence’s Safety Net Project in 2000 to provide a comprehensive training curriculum on how to “harness [technology] to help victims” and hold abusers accountable when they misuse it. Today, the project offers resources on its website, like tool kits that include guidance on strategies such as creating strong passwords and security questions. “When you’re in a relationship with someone,” explains director Audace Garnett, “they may know your mother’s maiden name.” 

Big Tech safeguards

Southworth’s efforts later extended to advising tech companies on how to protect users who have experienced intimate partner violence. In 2020, she joined Facebook (now Meta) as its head of women’s safety. “What really drew me to Facebook was the work on intimate image abuse,” she says, noting that the company had come up with one of the first “sextortion” policies in 2012. Now she works on “reactive hashing,” which adds “digital fingerprints” to images that have been identified as nonconsensual so that survivors only need to report them once for all repeats to get blocked.

Other areas of concern include “cyberflashing,” in which someone might share, say, unwanted explicit photos. Meta has worked to prevent that on Instagram by not allowing accounts to send images, videos, or voice notes unless they follow you. Besides that, though, many of Meta’s practices surrounding potential abuse appear to be more reactive than proactive. The company says it removes online threats that violate its policies against bullying and that promote “offline violence.” But earlier this year, Meta made its policies about speech on its platforms more permissive. Now users are allowed to refer to women as “household objects,” reported CNN, and to post transphobic and homophobic comments that had formerly been banned.

A key challenge is that the very same tech can be used for good or evil: A tracking function that’s dangerous for someone whose partner is using it to stalk them might help someone else stay abreast of a stalker’s whereabouts. When I asked sources what tech companies should be doing to mitigate technology-assisted abuse, researchers and lawyers alike tended to throw up their hands. One cited the problem of abusers using parental controls to monitor adults instead of children—tech companies won’t do away with those important features for keeping children safe, and there is only so much they can do to limit how customers use or misuse them. Safety Net’s Garnett said companies should design technology with safety in mind “from the get-go” but pointed out that in the case of many well-established products, it’s too late for that. A couple of computer scientists pointed to Apple as a company with especially effective security measures: Its closed ecosystem can block sneaky third-party apps and alert users when they’re being tracked. But these experts also acknowledged that none of these measures are foolproof. 

Over roughly the past decade, major US-based tech companies including Google, Meta, Airbnb, Apple, and Amazon have launched safety advisory boards to address this conundrum. The strategies they have implemented vary. At Uber, board members share feedback on “potential blind spots” and have influenced the development of customizable safety tools, says Liz Dank, who leads work on women’s and personal safety at the company. One result of this collaboration is Uber’s PIN verification feature, in which riders have to give drivers a unique number assigned by the app in order for the ride to start. This ensures that they’re getting into the right car. 

Apple’s approach has included detailed guidance in the form of a 140-page “Personal Safety User Guide.” Under one heading, “I want to escape or am considering leaving a relationship that doesn’t feel safe,” it provides links to pages about blocking and evidence collection and “safety steps that include unwanted tracking alerts.” 

Creative abusers can bypass these sorts of precautions. Recently Elizabeth (for privacy, we’re using her first name only) found an AirTag her ex had hidden inside a wheel well of her car, attached to a magnet and wrapped in duct tape. Months after the AirTag debuted, Apple had received enough reports about unwanted tracking to introduce a security measure letting users who’d been alerted that an AirTag was following them locate the device via sound. “That’s why he’d wrapped it in duct tape,” says Elizabeth. “To muffle the sound.”

Laws play catch-up

If tech companies can’t police TFA, law enforcement should—but its responses vary. “I’ve seen police say to a victim, ‘You shouldn’t have given him the picture,’” says Lisa Fontes, a psychologist and an expert on coercive control, about cases where intimate images are shared nonconsensually. When people have brought police hidden “nanny cams” planted by their abusers, Fontes has heard responses along the lines of “You can’t prove he bought it [or] that he was actually spying on you. So there’s nothing we can do.” 

Places like the Queens Family Justice Center in New York City aim to remedy these law enforcement challenges. Navigating its mazelike halls, you can’t avoid bumping into a mix of attorneys, social workers, and case managers—which I did when executive director Susan Jacob showed me around after my visit to CETA. That’s by design. The center, one of more than 100 throughout the US, provides multiple services for those affected by gender-based and domestic violence. As I left, I passed a police officer escorting a man in handcuffs.

CETA is in the process of moving its services here—and then to centers in the city’s other four boroughs. Having tech clinics at these centers will put the techies right next to lawyers who may be prosecuting cases. It’s tricky to prove the identity of people connected with anonymous forms of tech harassment like social media posts and spoofed phone calls, but the expert help could make it easier for lawyers to build cases for search warrants and protection orders.

Law enforcement’s responses to allegations of tech-facilitated abuse vary. “I’ve seen police say to a victim, ‘You shouldn’t have given him the picture.’”

Lisa Fontes, psychologist and expert on coercive control

Lawyers pursuing cases with tech components don’t always have the legal framework to back them up. But laws in most US states do prohibit remote, covert tracking and the nonconsensual sharing of intimate images, while laws relating to privacy invasion, computer crimes, and stalking might cover aspects of TFA. In December, Ohio passed a law making AirTag stalking a crime, and Florida is considering an amendment that would increase penalties for people who use tracking devices to “commit or facilitate commission of dangerous crimes.” But keeping up with evolving tech requires additional legal specificity. “Tech comes first,” explains Lindsey Song, associate program director of the Queens center’s family law project. “People use it well. Abusers figure out how to misuse it. The law and policy come way, way, way later.”

California is leading the charge in legislation addressing harassment via smart vehicles. Signed into law in September 2024, Senate Bill 1394 requires connected vehicles to notify users if someone has accessed their systems remotely and provide a way for drivers to stop that access. “Many lawmakers were shocked to learn how common this problem is,” says Akilah Weber Pierson, a state senator who coauthored the bill. “Once I explained how survivors were being stalked or controlled through features designed for convenience, there was a lot of support.”

At the federal level, the Safe Con­nections Act signed into law in 2022 requires mobile service providers to honor survivors’ requests to separate from abusers’ plans. As of 2024, the Federal Communications Commission has been examining how to incorporate smart-car-­facilitated abuse into the act’s purview. And in May, President Trump signed a bill prohibiting the online publication of sexually explicit images without consent. But there has been little progress on other fronts. The Tech Safety for Victims of Domestic Violence, Dating Violence, Sexual Assault, and Stalking Act would have authorized a pilot program, run by the Justice Department’s Office on Violence Against Women, to create as many as 15 TFA clinics for survivors. But since its introduction in the House of Representatives in November 2023, the bill has gone nowhere.

Tech abuse isn’t about tech

With changes happening so slowly at the legislative level, it remains largely up to folks on the ground to protect survivors from TFA. Rahul Chatterjee, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has taken a particularly hands-on approach. In 2021, he founded the Madison Tech Clinic after working at CETA as a graduate student. He and his team are working on a physical tool that can detect hidden cameras and other monitoring devices. The aim is to use cheap hardware like Raspberry Pis and ESP32s to keep it affordable.

Chatterjee has come across products online that purport to provide such protection, like radio frequency monitors for the impossibly low price of $20 and red-light devices claiming to detect invisible cameras. But they’re “snake oil,” he says. “We test them in the lab, and they don’t work.” 

With the Trump administration slashing academic funding, folks who run tech clinics have expressed concern about sustainability. Dell, at least, received $800,000 from the MacArthur Foundation in 2024, some of which she plans to put toward launching new CETA-like clinics. The tech clinic in Queens got some seed funding from CETA for its first year, but it is “actively seeking fundraising to continue the program,” says Jennifer Friedman, a lawyer with the nonprofit Sanctuary for Families, which is overseeing the clinic. 

While these clinics expose all sorts of malicious applications of technology, the moral of this story isn’t that you should fear your tech. It’s that people who aim to cause harm will take advantage of whatever new tools are available.

“[TFA] is not about the technology—it’s about the abuse,” says Garnett. “With or without the technology, the harm can still happen.” Ultimately, the only way to stem gender-based and intimate partner violence is at a societal level, through thoughtful legislation, amply funded antiviolence programs, and academic research that makes clinics like CETA possible.

In the meantime, to protect themselves, survivors like Gioia make do with Band-Aid fixes. She bought her kids separate smartphones and sports gear to use at her house so her ex couldn’t slip tracking devices into the equipment he’d provided. “I’m paying extra,” she says, “so stuff isn’t going back and forth.” She got a new number and a new phone. 

“Believe the people that [say this is happening to them],” she says, “because it’s going on, and it’s rampant.” 

Jessica Klein is a Philadelphia-based freelance journalist covering intimate partner violence, cryptocurrency, and other topics.

Tech billionaires are making a risky bet with humanity’s future

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it,” the famed computer scientist Alan Kay once said. Uttered more out of exasperation than as inspiration, his remark has nevertheless attained gospel-like status among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, in particular a handful of tech billionaires who fancy themselves the chief architects of humanity’s future. 

Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and others may have slightly different goals and ambitions in the near term, but their grand visions for the next decade and beyond are remarkably similar. Framed less as technological objectives and more as existential imperatives, they include aligning AI with the interests of humanity; creating an artificial superintelligence that will solve all the world’s most pressing problems; merging with that superintelligence to achieve immortality (or something close to it); establishing a permanent, self-­sustaining colony on Mars; and, ultimately, spreading out across the cosmos.

While there’s a sprawling patchwork of ideas and philosophies powering these visions, three features play a central role, says Adam Becker, a science writer and astrophysicist: an unshakable certainty that technology can solve any problem, a belief in the necessity of perpetual growth, and a quasi-religious obsession with transcending our physical and biological limits. In his timely new book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, Becker calls this triumvirate of beliefs the “ideology of technological salvation” and warns that tech titans are using it to steer humanity in a dangerous direction. 

“In most of these isms you’ll find the idea of escape and transcendence, as well as the promise of an amazing future, full of unimaginable wonders—so long as we don’t get in the way of technological progress.”

“The credence that tech billionaires give to these specific science-fictional futures validates their pursuit of more—to portray the growth of their businesses as a moral imperative, to reduce the complex problems of the world to simple questions of technology, [and] to justify nearly any action they might want to take,” he writes. Becker argues that the only way to break free of these visions is to see them for what they are: a convenient excuse to continue destroying the environment, skirt regulations, amass more power and control, and dismiss the very real problems of today to focus on the imagined ones of tomorrow. 

A lot of critics, academics, and journalists have tried to define or distill the Silicon Valley ethos over the years. There was the “Californian Ideology” in the mid-’90s, the “Move fast and break things” era of the early 2000s, and more recently the “Libertarianism for me, feudalism for thee”  or “techno-­authoritarian” views. How do you see the “ideology of technological salvation” fitting in? 

I’d say it’s very much of a piece with those earlier attempts to describe the Silicon Valley mindset. I mean, you can draw a pretty straight line from Max More’s principles of transhumanism in the ’90s to the Californian Ideology [a mashup of countercultural, libertarian, and neoliberal values] and through to what I call the ideology of technological salvation. The fact is, many of the ideas that define or animate Silicon Valley thinking have never been much of a ­mystery—libertarianism, an antipathy toward the government and regulation, the boundless faith in technology, the obsession with optimization. 

What can be difficult is to parse where all these ideas come from and how they fit together—or if they fit together at all. I came up with the ideology of technological salvation as a way to name and give shape to a group of interrelated concepts and philosophies that can seem sprawling and ill-defined at first, but that actually sit at the center of a worldview shared by venture capitalists, executives, and other thought leaders in the tech industry. 

Readers will likely be familiar with the tech billionaires featured in your book and at least some of their ambitions. I’m guessing they’ll be less familiar with the various “isms” that you argue have influenced or guided their thinking. Effective altruism, rationalism, long­termism, extropianism, effective accelerationism, futurism, singularitarianism, ­transhumanism—there are a lot of them. Is there something that they all share? 

They’re definitely connected. In a sense, you could say they’re all versions or instantiations of the ideology of technological salvation, but there are also some very deep historical connections between the people in these groups and their aims and beliefs. The Extropians in the late ’80s believed in self-­transformation through technology and freedom from limitations of any kind—ideas that Ray Kurzweil eventually helped popularize and legitimize for a larger audience with the Singularity. 

In most of these isms you’ll find the idea of escape and transcendence, as well as the promise of an amazing future, full of unimaginable wonders—so long as we don’t get in the way of technological progress. I should say that AI researcher Timnit Gebru and philosopher Émile Torres have also done a lot of great work linking these ideologies to one another and showing how they all have ties to racism, misogyny, and eugenics.

You argue that the Singularity is the purest expression of the ideology of technological salvation. How so?

Well, for one thing, it’s just this very simple, straightforward idea—the Singularity is coming and will occur when we merge our brains with the cloud and expand our intelligence a millionfold. This will then deepen our awareness and consciousness and everything will be amazing. In many ways, it’s a fantastical vision of a perfect technological utopia. We’re all going to live as long as we want in an eternal paradise, watched over by machines of loving grace, and everything will just get exponentially better forever. The end.

The other isms I talk about in the book have a little more … heft isn’t the right word—they just have more stuff going on. There’s more to them, right? The rationalists and the effective altruists and the longtermists—they think that something like a singularity will happen, or could happen, but that there’s this really big danger between where we are now and that potential event. We have to address the fact that an all-powerful AI might destroy humanity—the so-called alignment problem—before any singularity can happen. 

Then you’ve got the effective accelerationists, who are more like Kurzweil, but they’ve got more of a tech-bro spin on things. They’ve taken some of the older transhumanist ideas from the Singularity and updated them for startup culture. Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” [from 2023] is a good example. You could argue that all of these other philosophies that have gained purchase in Silicon Valley are just twists on Kurzweil’s Singularity, each one building on top of the core ideas of transcendence, techno­-optimism, and exponential growth. 

Early on in the book you take aim at that idea of exponential growth—specifically, Kurzweil’s “Law of Accelerating Returns.” Could you explain what that is and why you think it’s flawed?

Kurzweil thinks there’s this immutable “Law of Accelerating Returns” at work in the affairs of the universe, especially when it comes to technology. It’s the idea that technological progress isn’t linear but exponential. Advancements in one technology fuel even more rapid advancements in the future, which in turn lead to greater complexity and greater technological power, and on and on. This is just a mistake. Kurzweil uses the Law of Accelerating Returns to explain why the Singularity is inevitable, but to be clear, he’s far from the only one who believes in this so-called law.

“I really believe that when you get as rich as some of these guys are, you can just do things that seem like thinking and no one is really going to correct you or tell you things you don’t want to hear.”

My sense is that it’s an idea that comes from staring at Moore’s Law for too long. Moore’s Law is of course the famous prediction that the number of transistors on a chip will double roughly every two years, with a minimal increase in cost. Now, that has in fact happened for the last 50 years or so, but not because of some fundamental law in the universe. It’s because the tech industry made a choice and some very sizable investments to make it happen. Moore’s Law was ultimately this really interesting observation or projection of a historical trend, but even Gordon Moore [who first articulated it] knew that it wouldn’t and couldn’t last forever. In fact, some think it’s already over. 

These ideologies take inspiration from some pretty unsavory characters. Transhumanism, you say, was first popularized by the eugenicist Julian Huxley in a speech in 1951. Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” name-checks the noted fascist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his futurist manifesto. Did you get the sense while researching the book that the tech titans who champion these ideas understand their dangerous origins?

You’re assuming in the framing of that question that there’s any rigorous thought going on here at all. As I say in the book, Andreessen’s manifesto runs almost entirely on vibes, not logic. I think someone may have told him about the futurist manifesto at some point, and he just sort of liked the general vibe, which is why he paraphrases a part of it. Maybe he learned something about Marinetti and forgot it. Maybe he didn’t care. 

I really believe that when you get as rich as some of these guys are, you can just do things that seem like thinking and no one is really going to correct you or tell you things you don’t want to hear. For many of these billionaires, the vibes of fascism, authoritarianism, and colonialism are attractive because they’re fundamentally about creating a fantasy of control. 

You argue that these visions of the future are being used to hasten environmental destruction, increase authoritarianism, and exacerbate inequalities. You also admit that they appeal to lots of people who aren’t billionaires. Why do you think that is? 

I think a lot of us are also attracted to these ideas for the same reasons the tech billionaires are—they offer this fantasy of knowing what the future holds, of transcending death, and a sense that someone or something out there is in control. It’s hard to overstate how comforting a simple, coherent narrative can be in an increasingly complex and fast-moving world. This is of course what religion offers for many of us, and I don’t think it’s an accident that a sizable number of people in the rationalist and effective altruist communities are actually ex-evangelicals.

More than any one specific technology, it seems like the most consequential thing these billionaires have invented is a sense of inevitability—that their visions for the future are somehow predestined. How does one fight against that?

It’s a difficult question. For me, the answer was to write this book. I guess I’d also say this: Silicon Valley enjoyed well over a decade with little to no pushback on anything. That’s definitely a big part of how we ended up in this mess. There was no regulation, very little critical coverage in the press, and a lot of self-mythologizing going on. Things have started to change, especially as the social and environmental damage that tech companies and industry leaders have helped facilitate has become more clear. That understanding is an essential part of deflating the power of these tech billionaires and breaking free of their visions. When we understand that these dreams of the future are actually nightmares for the rest of us, I think you’ll see that sense
of inevitability vanish pretty fast. 

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Bryan Gardiner is a writer based in Oakland, California. 

OpenAI: The power and the pride

In April, Paul Graham, the founder of the tech startup accelerator Y Combinator, sent a tweet in response to former YC president and current OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Altman had just bid a public goodbye to GPT-4 on X, and Graham had a follow-up question. 

“If you had [GPT-4’s model weights] etched on a piece of metal in the most compressed form,” Graham wrote, referring to the values that determine the model’s behavior, “how big would the piece of metal have to be? This is a mostly serious question. These models are history, and by default digital data evaporates.” 

There is no question that OpenAI pulled off something historic with its release of ChatGPT 3.5 in 2022. It set in motion an AI arms race that has already changed the world in a number of ways and seems poised to have an even greater long-term effect than the short-term disruptions to things like education and employment that we are already beginning to see. How that turns out for humanity is something we are still reckoning with and may be for quite some time. But a pair of recent books both attempt to get their arms around it with accounts of what two leading technology journalists saw at the OpenAI revolution. 

In Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, Karen Hao tells the story of the company’s rise to power and its far-reaching impact all over the world. Meanwhile, The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future, by the Wall Street Journal’s Keach Hagey, homes in more on Altman’s personal life, from his childhood through the present day, in order to tell the story of OpenAI. Both paint complex pictures and show Altman in particular as a brilliantly effective yet deeply flawed creature of Silicon Valley—someone capable of always getting what he wants, but often by manipulating others. 

Hao, who was formerly a reporter with MIT Technology Review, began reporting on OpenAI while at this publication and remains an occasional contributor. One chapter of her book grew directly out of that reporting. And in fact, as Hao says in the acknowledgments of Empire of AI, some of her reporting for MIT Technology Review, a series on AI colonialism, “laid the groundwork for the thesis and, ultimately, the title of this book.” So you can take this as a kind of disclaimer that we are predisposed to look favorably on Hao’s work. 

With that said, Empire of AI is a powerful work, bristling not only with great reporting but also with big ideas. This comes across in service to two main themes. 

The first is simple: It is the story of ambition overriding ethics. The history of OpenAI as Hao tells it (and as Hagey does too) is very much a tale of a company that was founded on the idealistic desire to create a safety-focused artificial general intelligence but instead became more interested in winning. This is a story we’ve seen many times before in Big Tech. See Theranos, which was going to make diagnostics easier, or Uber, which was founded to break the cartel of “Big Taxi.” But the closest analogue might be Google, which went from “Don’t be evil” to (at least in the eyes of the courts) illegal monopolist. For that matter, consider how Google went from holding off on releasing its language model as a consumer product out of an abundance of caution to rushing a chatbot out the door to catch up with and beat OpenAI. In Silicon Valley, no matter what one’s original intent, it always comes back to winning.  

The second theme is more complex and forms the book’s thesis about what Hao calls AI colonialism. The idea is that the large AI companies act like traditional empires, siphoning wealth from the bottom rungs of society in the forms of labor, creative works, raw materials, and the like to fuel their ambition and enrich those at the top of the ladder. “I’ve found only one metaphor that encapsulates the nature of what these AI power players are: empires,” she writes.

“During the long era of European colonialism, empires seized and extracted resources that were not their own and exploited the labor of the people they subjugated to mine, cultivate, and refine those resources for the empires’ enrichment.” She goes on to chronicle her own growing disillusionment with the industry. “With increasing clarity,” she writes, “I realized that the very revolution promising to bring a better future was instead, for people on the margins of society, reviving the darkest remnants of the past.” 

To document this, Hao steps away from her desk and goes out into the world to see the effects of this empire as it sprawls across the planet. She travels to Colombia to meet with data labelers tasked with teaching AI what various images show, one of whom she describes sprinting back to her apartment for the chance to make a few dollars. She documents how workers in Kenya who performed data-labeling content moderation for OpenAI came away traumatized by seeing so much disturbing material. In Chile she documents how the industry extracts precious resources—water, power, copper, lithium—to build out data centers. 

She lands on the ways people are pushing back against the empire of AI across the world. Hao draws lessons from New Zealand, where Maori people are attempting to save their language using a small language model of their own making. Trained on volunteers’ voice recordings and running on just two graphics processing units, or GPUs, rather than the thousands employed by the likes of OpenAI, it’s meant to benefit the community, not exploit it. 

Hao writes that she is not against AI. Rather: “What I reject is the dangerous notion that broad benefit from AI can only be derived from—indeed will ever emerge from—a vision of the technology that requires the complete capitulation of our privacy, our agency, and our worth, including the value of our labor and art, toward an ultimately imperial centralization project … [The New Zealand model] shows us another way. It imagines how AI could be exactly the opposite. Models can be small and task-specific, their training data contained and knowable, ridding the incentives for widespread exploitative and psychologically harmful labor practices and the all-consuming extractivism of producing and running massive supercomputers.” 

Hagey’s book is more squarely focused on Altman’s ambition, which she traces back to his childhood. Yet interestingly, she also  zeroes in on the OpenAI CEO’s attempt to create an empire. Indeed, “Altman’s departure from YC had not slowed his civilization-building ambitions,” Hagey writes. She goes on to chronicle how Altman, who had previously mulled a run for governor of California, set up experiments with income distribution via Tools for Humanity, the parent company of Worldcoin. She quotes Altman saying of it, “I thought it would be interesting to see … just how far technology could accomplish some of the goals that used to be done by nation-states.” 

Overall, The Optimist is the more straightforward business biography of the two. Hagey has packed it full with scoops and insights and behind-the-scenes intrigue. It is immensely readable as a result, especially in the second half, when OpenAI really takes over the story. Hagey also seems to have been given far more access to Altman and his inner circles, personal and professional, than Hao did, and that allows for a fuller telling of the CEO’s story in places. For example, both writers cover the tragic story of Altman’s sister Annie, her estrangement from the family, and her accusations in particular about suffering sexual abuse at the hands of Sam (something he and the rest of the Altman family vehemently deny). Hagey’s telling provides a more nuanced picture of the situation, with more insight into family dynamics. 

Hagey concludes by describing Altman’s reckoning with his role in the long arc of human history and what it will mean to create a “superintelligence.” His place in that sweep is something that clearly has consumed the CEO’s thoughts. When Paul Graham asked about preserving GPT-4, for example, Altman had a response at the ready. He replied that the company had already considered this, and that the sheet of metal would need to be 100 meters square.