I don't think Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is a bad guy, or that he has nefarious plans for Nvidia, but the most consequential villains in history are rarely evil. They just go down a terribly wrong path, and end up leaving totally forseeable, but ultimately inevitable ruin in their wake.

The bartender pouring free drinks glances around with nothing to do as the raucous room full of startup founders and software developers gravitates toward its preferred drug: networking.

Inside the many debates swirling around the rapid rollout of so-called artificial intelligence, there is a relatively obscure skirmish focused on the choice of the word “hallucinate”.

Big Tech’s warnings about an AI apocalypse are distracting us from years of actual harms their products have caused. On Tuesday morning, the merchants of artificial intelligence warned once again about the existential might of their products.

Could we stop worshipping rich men who are jerks? On Tuesday, Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla, took to Twitter once again with bizarre comments, saying how “strange” it is that the cave diver who rescued the Thai boys didn’t sue him after he called him a pedophile.

Society’s winners can seem so generous, until you consider what they’re really selling. “Change the world” has long been the cry of the oppressed. But in recent years world-changing has been co-opted by the rich and the powerful.

Dale Baker was introduced to simulation theory five years ago as an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Iowa. The idea that our reality may be nothing more than a computer-generated simulation was first presented to him in his Religion vs. Science class.

Levandowski’s church will enter a tech universe that’s already riven by debate over the promise and perils of AI. Some thinkers, like Kevin Kelly in Backchannel earlier this year, argue that AI isn’t going to develop superhuman power any time soon, and that there’s no Singularity in sight.

We are witnessing the beginning of Silicon Valley institutionalizing its religious beliefs.

We are witnessing the beginning of Silicon Valley institutionalizing its religious beliefs.

There are good reasons to worry about the future of humanity. Do we have a future, and if so, how much and what kind? For most people, it’s easier to feel these existential concerns for our species than it is to do something about them. But some are taking action.

For 10 years Josephine was a rarity: a female hotshot in the heart of Silicon Valley. Having made her name, she was in demand and looked forward to climbing the corporate ladder at least as fast as her male co-workers.

What do the most powerful people in the world read? For Donald Trump, the depressing but familiar answer is nothing beyond tweets and headlines.

Steve Huffman, the thirty-three-year-old co-founder and C.E.O. of Reddit, which is valued at six hundred million dollars, was nearsighted until November, 2015, when he arranged to have laser eye surgery.

Silicon Valley is coming for death. But it’s looking in the wrong place. After disrupting the way we love, communicate, travel, work, and even eat, technologists believe they can solve the ultimate problem.

Throughout history, the world’s greatest minds have been obsessed with immortality. The scientists and entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley are no exception “I’ve already lowered my biological age and upgraded my IQ,” says Silicon valley entrepreneur Dave Asprey.

If the transhumanists have their way, technology will, slowly but surely, erase metaphorical and physical borders.

The things we create define us, as a culture and as a species. Yet, so often, as we hurtle into the future, our creations seem to take on a life of their own.

Silicon Valley’s sunny outlook on technology and opportunity ignores systematic inequalities. Just over a century ago, an electric company in Minnesota took out a full-page newspaper advertisement and listed 1,000 uses for electricity.

Why has the narrative of computer history come to be defined more by images of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg than by the pioneering work of Ada Lovelace, who is often recognized as the world’s first computer programmer? This question and many others are increasingly being asked by women all acr