The Rip Current

I’ve been watching robots fall over for a long time. About a decade ago, I stood on a Florida speedway covering a DARPA robotics competition where machines failed spectacularly at things like opening doors and climbing stairs. It was funny, a little sad, and a reminder of just how hard it is to automate human behavior. Fast-forward to CES this week, and the joke’s over. The Rip Current by Jacob Wa...

Why do kids form biases almost instantly? Why do people punish unfairness even when it costs them? And why do social media and AI seem to make all of this worse? In this episode of The Rip Current, I sit down with Yale psychologist Yarrow Dunham to unpack his many years of research into how humans form groups, enforce fairness, and turn tiny assumptions into lifelong beliefs. We talk about childre...

It’s a very weird Monday back from the holidays. While most of us were shaking off jet lag and reminding ourselves who we are when we’re not sleeping late and hanging with family, the world woke up to a piece of news this weekend that showed no one in power learned a goddamn thing in history class: the United States has rendered Venezuela’s president to New York, and powerful people are openly fan...

Happy New Year! I’ve been off for the holiday — we cranked through a bake-off, a dance party, a family hot tub visit, and a makeshift ball drop in the living room of a snowy cabin — and I’m feeling recharged for (at least some portion of) 2026. So let’s get to it. I woke to reports that “safeguard failures” in Elon Musk’s Grok led to the generation of child sexual exploitative material ( Reuters )...

Here’s one I truly didn’t see coming: the Trump administration just made the most scientifically meaningful shift in U.S. marijuana policy in years. No, weed isn’t suddenly legal everywhere. But moving marijuana from Schedule I — alongside heroin — to Schedule III is a very big deal. That single bureaucratic change cracks open something that’s been locked shut for half a century: real research. Fo...

Okay, honest admission here: I don’t fully know what I think about this topic yet. A podcast producer ( thanks Nancy !) once told me “let them watch you think out loud,” and I’m taking her to heart — because the thing I’m worried about is already happening to me. Lately, I’ve been leaning hard on AI tools, God help me. Not to write for me — a little, sure, but for the most part I still do that mys...

Note: You can read a deeper dive into this whole issue in my weekly column over at Hard Reset . The United States has a split personality when it comes to AI data centers. On the one side, tech leaders (and the White House) celebrate artificial intelligence as a symbol of national power and economic growth. But politicians from Bernie Sanders to Ron DeSantis point out that when it shows up in our...

Geoff Bennett invited me onto Newshour on Friday to discuss the president’s executive order outlawing state regulations when it comes to A.I. I’m used to the 90-second to 3-minute format that’s so common on the networks, so to have the breathing room Geoff gave me on this topic was wonderful , and let me get into some of the subtleties and context that this debate often excludes! Also, big props t...

For most of modern history, regulation in Western democracies has focused on two kinds of harm: people dying and people losing money. But with AI, that’s beginning to change. This week, the headlines point toward a new understanding that more is at stake than our physical health and our wallets: governments are starting to treat our psychological relationship with technology as a real risk. Not a...

Note: This is a video summary of a longer column I wrote for Hard Reset today. Please have a look! President Trump has signed a sweeping executive order aimed at blocking U.S. states from regulating artificial intelligence — arguing that a “patchwork” of laws threatens innovation and America’s global competitiveness. But there’s a catch: there is no federal AI law to replace what states have been...

This week I sat down with the woman who permanently rewired my understanding of human nature — and now she’s turning her attention to the nature of the machines we’ve gone crazy for. ⁠Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji⁠ coined the term “ ⁠implicit bias⁠ ” and has conducted research for decades into the blind spots we don’t admit even to ourselves. The work that blew my hair back shows ⁠how preju...

Australia just imposed a blanket ban on social media for kids under the age of 16. It’s not just the strictest tech policy of any democracy — it’s stricter than China’s laws . No TikTok, no Instagram, no SnapChat, that’s it. And while Washington dithers behind a 1998 law written before Google existed, other countries are gearing up to copy Australia’s homework (Malaysia imposes a similar ban on Ja...

The big AI conference NeurIPS is under way in San Diego this week, and nearly 6,000 papers presented there will set the technical, intellectual, and ethical course for AI for the year. NeurIPS is a strange pseudo-academic gathering, where researchers from universities show up to present their findings alongside employees of Apple and Nvidia , part of the strange public-private revolving door of th...

I’ve been in a pretty steady cadence of appearances on CBS News these days, and it’s been a wonderful place to have open-ended conversations about the latest tech headlines. Yesterday they had me on to talk about OpenAI’s “Code Red” memo commanding its employees to delay other products and projects and focus on making ChatGPT as “intuitive and emotional” as possible. Programming Note: Tomorrow (Th...

According to the Wall Street Journal , Sam Altman sent an internal memo on Monday declaring a company-wide emergency and presumably ruining the holiday wind-down hopes of his faithful employees. OpenAI is hitting pause on advertising plans, delaying AI agents for health and shopping, and shelving a personal assistant called “Pulse.” All hands are being pulled back to one mission: making ChatGPT fe...

Shameless Plug Number One: On Thursday I’ll be guest-hosting Tech News Weekly , where I’ll interview journalists about AI companionship, AI-regulating California state senator Scott Wiener and more! Shameless Plug Number Two: I had a really wonderful conversation on the Meredith for Real podcast this week. You don’t often get to speak with someone who actually reads the whole book and comes ready...

It’s a warning siren: people seeing delusions they never knew they had amplified by AI, a wave of lawsuits alleging emotional manipulation and even suicide coaching, a major company banning minors from talking freely with chatbots for fear of excessive attachment, and a top mental-health safety expert at OpenAI quietly heading for the exit. For years I’ve argued that AI would distort our thinking...

Today I dug into the one corner of the economy that’s supposed to keep its head when everyone else is drunk on hype: the insurance industry. Three of the biggest carriers in the country—AIG, Great American, and W.R. Berkley—are now begging regulators not to force them to cover A.I.-related losses, according to the Financial Times . These are the people who price hurricanes, wildfires, and war zone...

I’m now a proud weekly contributor over at Hard Reset , which looks at the effects of technology on society, labor, and politics, and I’ve got exhaustive coverage of this story over there. Go have a look! The only laws protecting you from the worst excesses of A.I. might be wiped out — and fast. A leaked Trump executive order would ban states from regulating A.I. at all, rolling over the only mean...

In today’s episode, I’m following the money, the infrastructure, and the politics:Nvidia just posted another monster quarter and showed that it’s still the caffeine in the US economy. Investors briefly relaxed, even as they warned that an AI bubble is still the top fear in markets. Google jammed Gemini 3 deeper into Search in a bid to regain narrative control. Cloudflare broke down and reminded us...

In today’s Deep Cut, we look at the strange, repeating pattern of civilizations wildly overbuilding their infrastructure because they’re sure the future depends on it. Tulsa, Oklahoma once built a highway grid for millions who never arrived. Britain in the 1840s poured money into rail lines that didn’t need to exist. And now the world’s biggest tech companies are spending trillions on AI data cent...

Good morning — it’s Monday, November 17th, and today’s “Map” traces the forces shaping the week ahead in tech, money, and global politics. We start with something rare: Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway quietly taking a $4.9 billion stake in Alphabet — one of the last and most unusual moves of his career, and a signal about where the long-term AI value is consolidating. On the other side of the...

Are we ready to take on the tech titans? Sacha Haworth thinks maybe—just maybe—we finally are. The head of the Tech Oversight Project joins me this week to talk about the pervasive influence of Big Tech on our lives, and why recognizing a growing allergy to that influence is becoming a centerpiece of political strategy. We discuss the public’s growing concerns over privacy, children’s addiction to...

This week I speak with Michael Bolden, the new Dean of the UC Berkeley Journalism School, about his personal journey from Mobile, Alabama, to leading one of the country’s top journalism schools. We agree — because of course — on the philosophical importance of journalism, but it’s the complications brought by AI and media technology, and the rise of influencer culture, where things get complicated...

Jesse Damiani, whose newsletter Reality Studies unpacks emerging philosophical questions around technology, had me on his Urgent Futures podcast last week for an hour-plus conversation about the state of A.I., and where my 2022 book The Loop got it right and got it wrong. The Rip Current by Jacob Ward is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a...