Aaron Mak

The recent blowup over Jimmy Kimmel is driven by a lot of powerful currents in American life—grief, politics, business, freedom of speech.

Jay Stanley is the resident futurist at the American Civil Liberties Union. Asked what technology he thinks is overhyped, he said, "Obviously, the big question today is whether large language models and generative AI are overhyped. It’s certainly overhyped in the sense that it’s being deployed where it’s really not ready for prime time. Because it hasn’t been fully vetted in terms of its fairness, effectiveness and bias, it’s being used to replace humans in ways that degrade services for people. It makes decisions about human beings that have consequences for their lives.

Just how far is the U.S. ahead of China in the AI race? The conventional wisdom is that the U.S. has an edge on China in artificial intelligence—and President Donald Trump’s ambitious new AI policy is built around keeping it. What it means to have an “edge” is ill-defined: it could be technological, economic or geopolitical. “I don’t know how to answer that,” said Suresh Venkatasubramanian, who served in the Biden White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, when DFD asked if the U.S. is ahead.

The United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act was passed in 2023 to protect users, particularly children, from harmful online content. The law puts age verification limits on a whole range of material — pornography, hate speech, content promoting drugs and weapons, online harassment, and depictions of violence. The act’s verification provisions went into effect in late July. As soon as it did, UK internet users found themselves having to upload IDs and selfies to prove they were old enough to access certain content.

Steven Renderos is the executive director of MediaJustice, a national nonprofit based in Oakland, California, that advocates for the technology rights of people of color. What’s one big, underrated idea? "Winning the AI race doesn’t matter if our communities lose. Communities deserve the right to shape what technology does in their lives.

A major deal between two tech companies is threatening to tear the Department of Justice’s antitrust division apart. Roger Alford and William Rinner—who had served in the department during President Donald Trump’s first term—were fired for insubordination after weeks of discord within the division about a corporate acquisition. The firing also calls into question the future of antitrust chief Gail Slater’s tech enforcement agenda. Curiously, the deal at the center of the drama was—if anything—a run-of-the-mill antitrust case.

There’s one big exception to the Trump Administration’s pro-tech, anti-Biden policy agenda so far — its antitrust efforts. At least since tech CEOs all donated millions of dollars to the inauguration, and sat on the dais, President Trump has generally been happy to rub shoulders with Silicon Valley elites, and even more eager to scorch anything that his predecessor put into place. However, that doesn’t quite square with the Trump Administration’s persistence on Big Tech antitrust.

The Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy saga is blowing up in the White House’s face—and Elon Musk’s remake of X helped light the fuse. Conspiracy theories about Epstein—and the Trump administration’s supposed complicity in silencing them—are starting to split MAGA’s unruly factions and turn part of the movement against the president. It was Musk himself who wrenched the Epstein affair back into public consciousness during his 

Artificial intelligence feels like it’s everywhere these days, and the wireless networks connecting our devices will soon be no exception. Telecom wonks are determining how AI should be built into sprawling cellular networks to better transmit phone calls and allocate resources for the hundreds of data-hungry apps that people use each day. Every decade or so, a new generation of wireless technology arrives for our phones, marked in the transitions from 2G to 3G and so on. We’re on 5G now, which brought the fastest speeds people have seen to date, starting in 2019.

The push to prepare kids for the AI future is raising tricky ethical questions about how to bring the technology into the classroom. Early research shows that AI has a lot to offer for schooling. A 2023 study found the technology can provide students with more tailored instruction and feedback, and the United Nations suggested in 2021 that AI chatbots could be a 24/7 personalized educational resource for students when teachers are off the clock. At the same time, evidence is emerging that AI could wreak havoc on a young person’s mental health.