Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – Nov 20, 2023

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The New Yorker – November 20, 2023 issue: The new issue features The A.I. Issue – Joshua Rothman on the godfather of A.I., Eyal Press on facial-recognition technology, Anna Wiener on Holly Herndon, and more…

Why the Godfather of A.I. Fears What He’s Built

Geoffrey Hinton has spent a lifetime teaching computers to learn. Now he worries that artificial brains are better than ours.

By Joshua Rothman

In your brain, neurons are arranged in networks big and small. With every action, with every thought, the networks change: neurons are included or excluded, and the connections between them strengthen or fade. This process goes on all the time—it’s happening now, as you read these words—and its scale is beyond imagining. You have some eighty billion neurons sharing a hundred trillion connections or more. Your skull contains a galaxy’s worth of constellations, always shifting.

Does A.I. Lead Police to Ignore Contradictory Evidence?

A profile of a face overlaid with various panels.

Too often, a facial-recognition search represents virtually the entirety of a police investigation.


By Eyal Press

On March 26, 2022, at around 8:20 a.m., a man in light-blue Nike sweatpants boarded a bus near a shopping plaza in Timonium, outside Baltimore. After the bus driver ordered him to observe a rule requiring passengers to wear face masks, he approached the fare box and began arguing with her. “I hit bitches,” he said, leaning over a plastic shield that the driver was sitting behind. When she pulled out her iPhone to call the police, he reached around the shield, snatched the device, and raced off. The bus driver followed the man outside, where he punched her in the face repeatedly. He then stood by the curb, laughing, as his victim wiped blood from her nose.

Personal HistoryA Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft

Coding has always felt to me like an endlessly deep and rich domain. Now I find myself wanting to write a eulogy for it.

By James Somers

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