Is Washington Up to the Challenge of A.I.? How anger over artificial intelligence might drive the next wave of populist politics. The Washington Roundtable discusses the growing political backlash to artificial intelligence, especially among young Americans, and asks whether Washington is capable of regulating A.I. companies. They're joined by Nate Soares, the executive director of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and co-author of the book " If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies ." The group explores what was behind the White House's sudden reversal on an A.I.-safety executive order this week, the outsized influence of venture capitalists in the A.I. industry, and how A.I. may turbocharge the next populist movement in American politics. "My impression is that a lot of the people protesting data centers can sort of tell that this A.I. stuff is taking the world somewhere they don't want," Soares says.

Michael Pollan: 'Consciousness is really under siege' A psychedelic experience set author Michael Pollan on a quest to understand consciousness in his new book A World Appears. Michael Pollan: "Psychedelics have a way of smudging the windshield of experience" Author Michael Pollan has tackled plants, food and psychedelics in bestselling books including The Omnivore's Dilemma and How to Change Your Mind . Now, he has taken on the thorny problem of consciousness. In his latest book, Pollan charts the work of scientists and philosophers, weaving in literary perspectives along the way. He spoke to New Scientist about the value of writing a book where you know less at the end than before you started.

How Bad Is Plagiarism, Really? From ancient Rome to the era of A.I., people have prized originality, but the line where influence ends and cribbing begins is notoriously blurry. One pleasing facet of plagiarism is that, in the eyes of the law, it doesn't exist. I could come over later, bring a few beers, and we could, you know, get down to some serious humanizing. Hard to resist, these days, given what's at stake. For students with assignments to complete, who have already vanquished their desolation by asking ChatGPT to compose an essay on their behalf, a humanizer is an A.I. tool that takes what has been produced, puts it through a further digital mill, and makes it sound as if it had emerged from a verifiable person. Among the companies that offer such tools are StealthWriter, HIX AI, and QuillBot. Anyone who has buttered and blitzed a mountain of mashed potatoes into a purée will understand.

Can Michael Pollan crack the problem of consciousness in his new book? It is one of the most perplexing questions in science. You would expect our intimacy with it to give us a leg up in understanding how it works, but this has proven to be more of a hindrance than a help. So how can you study something objectively when it is also the very tool you are using to do the studying? This conundrum forms the backbone of Michael Pollan's latest book, Pollan's previous works include and The former helped bring the environmental and animal welfare impacts of the US food system to light, while the latter introduced the public to the psychedelic research renaissance.

Three books unpack our infatuation with prediction, and what we lose when we outsource this task to machines. To be human is, fundamentally, to be a forecaster. Trying to see the future, whether through the lens of past experience or the logic of cause and effect, has helped us hunt, avoid hunted, plant crops, forge social bonds, and in general survive in a world that does not prioritize our survival. Indeed, as the tools of divination have changed over the centuries, from tea leaves to data sets, our conviction that the future can be known (and therefore controlled) has only grown stronger. Today, we are awash in a sea of predictions so vast and unrelenting that most of us barely even register them. As I write this sentence, algorithms on some remote server are busy trying to guess my next word based on those I have already typed.