In the fall of 2016--the year in which the proportion of online adults using social media reached eighty per cent--I published an Op-Ed in the Times that questioned the popular conception that you need to cultivate a strong social-media brand to succeed in the job market. "I think this behavior is misguided," I wrote. "In a capitalist economy, the market rewards things that are rare and valuable. Social media use is decidedly not rare or valuable." I suggested that knowledge workers instead spend time developing useful skills, with the goal of distinguishing themselves in their chosen fields.

This is getting way too familiar. Loab is an AI "entity" with ugly biometric images and a dystopian side built in. So is the spiel that goes with Loab. Artificial intelligence could steal humanity's mediocrity from it. All that banality wasted in a sea of self-generated realities.

To this day, one of the most dangerous weapons on Earth is a box of matches. The problem is that AI is perfectly capable of being a superweapon and nobody's looking at slamming on the brakes. There was a rather gruesome article in VOX in March this year which spelled out some of the risks. AI could discover both super-drugs and super-weapons. The same applies to bioweapons and similar "learnable" threats.

Let me introduce you to Marie. Marie is a 28-year-old professional and while on her way home from work is talking to a TikTok follower about the French elections. This follower has an uncanny ability to touch on subjects that mean the most to her. Almost overnight, Marie's social media feeds become increasingly filled with political themes, until on election day, her vote has already been heavily influenced. The trouble is the TikTok follower is not a person, but an artificial intelligence-driven bot, exploiting personal but publicly available data about Marie to manipulate her opinion.

It started out as a social experiment, but it quickly came to a bitter end. Microsoft's chatbot Tay had been trained to have "casual and playful conversations" on Twitter, but once it was deployed, it took only 16 hours before Tay launched into tirades that included racist and misogynistic tweets. As it turned out, Tay was mostly repeating the verbal abuse that humans were spouting at it -- but the outrage that followed centered on the bad influence that Tay had on people who could see its hateful tweets, rather than on the people whose hateful tweets were a bad influence on Tay. As children, we are all taught to be good people. Perhaps even more important, we are taught that bad company can corrupt good character -- and one bad apple can spoil the bunch. Today, we increasingly interact with machines powered by artificial intelligence -- AI-powered smart toys as well as AI-driven social media platforms that affect our preferences.

The AI system absorbs ASAT trajectory data to identify possible targets. It then rapidly develops multiple courses of action, which could include maneuvering, countermeasures, or engaging in offensive or defensive activities. Operators and commanders then receive a timely menu of optimized choices, which accelerates command-and-control decision-making and strengthens space defense in mission-critical situations.

On Dec. 11, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Joseph Epstein claiming that Jill Biden's use of the title "Dr." feels "fraudulent, even comic," and referring to her as "kiddo." The tone of the piece is all too familiar to women, especially Black and brown women, across academia, who know what it feels like to be constantly questioned about their expertise from peers and strangers alike. The article led to an uproar, with academics across disciplines calling out its sexism and snobbery. Responses in the Atlantic, the New York Times, Forbes, and elsewhere argued that Biden should ignore Epstein's advice to "consider stowing" her degree and stick to her honorific. Academia is no stranger to overt and subtle sexism, which can manifest through student evaluations or even how women academics are introduced during speaking engagements.

The sheer volume of rhetoric and shill-like babble about military AI is already gigantic. The constant stream of new AI in military roles is making headlines every day. Everyone has an opinion; answers to questions, maybe not. The likely effect of super-lethal AI-operated weapons is one of those questions. "Slaughter" is the more usual answer.

Corruption has again been exposed at Los Angeles City Hall, with one council member under indictment in a development scandal and another having pleaded guilty to his part in it. The transgressions highlight the real-world consequences of failing to modernize outdated planning codes and leaving decision-making power over development projects in the hands of City Council members. To try to prevent future corruption, the city needs to fix what's broken about L.A. planning -- by fully updating planning and zoning laws according to the recommendations of an outside commission, not the council. Some City Council members have proposed incremental reforms in reaction to the indictment of council member Jose Huizar, who has been charged with a running a "pay-to-play" scheme to shake down real estate developers for cash bribes and campaign donations in exchange for his help getting high-rise development projects approved. Former council member Mitch Englander pleaded guilty to falsifying material facts related to the scheme.

A chilling opinion piece written by a robot for The Guardian reveals how far intelligent machines have come, and how convincing they can be. In an Op-Ed for the newspaper, a robot called GPT-3 was tasked with convincing its human readers that robots are harmless and come in peace. What follows is a disturbing 1,000-word essay from the brain of a computer doing just that thanks to OpenAI's powerful new language generator. And it starts with an introduction paragraph written by the Guardian, but the rest was created by the machine itself. I use only 0.12% of my cognitive capacity.