Tech

As currently constructed, AI is an oligarchy-enriching, worker-immiserating, energy-depleting, brain-rotting economic bubble in waiting. Democrats can get on the public’s side here.

The Trump White House is increasing our risk of premature death while helping its wealthy allies get richer quicker.

Who is behind the fast-growing abundance movement? Who are the billionaires and media figures helping it gain popularity?

These are not good people. They do not bat an eye at facilitating a mental health epidemic, hurting millions of people with reckless foreign aid cuts, destroying our media ecosystem, or even abetting genocide. Any tent able to accommodate their outsized egos and influence will have no room for the common good or basic human decency.

This report sets out to excavate the proposed policy prescriptions of the broader abundance movement, and thoroughly address their flaws.

Billionaire Jeff Yass, a GOP mega-donor including $16 million to Trump super PAC MAGA Inc., has influence over education and TikTok policy.

The choice now is whether the United States continues to aid and abet Silicon Valley’s environmental rampage or to fight it.

Before DOGE’s lawbreaking spree, there was ‘blitzscaling.’

With the National Guard haunting the streets of Washington, D.C., it’s been an ominous week. DC takeover aside, the most immediately visible expressions of Trump’s efforts to consolidate and expand his power are: the administration’s ongoing multi-pronged efforts to let corporations break the law with impunity while raking in record profits; a new shakedown tactic to secure a cut of technology sales to China; and an attack on the research grant process, which is critical to scientific pursuits across the country. 

In his latest broadside against the left, Mattew Yglesias took aim at longtime critics of Uber’s blatant lawbreaking. In Yglesias’s view, these critics who range from anti-monopoly voices like Lina Khan to anti-corruption experts like our own Jeff Hauser and academics focused on financial regulation like Professor Hillary Allen, constitute a coterie of economics-hating zealots eager to make people’s lives worse. 

The book is fascinating and surprisingly fun—with Wang’s piercing dry wit interspersed at a near perfect frequency. It’s also frustrating. While the character of the engineering state is superbly developed, the points where its American “lawyerly” counterpart is brought into the mix are more tenuous.

Many Americans will pay for AI with their health—especially thanks to Donald Trump’s war on renewable energy.