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After diving into this rabbit hole, I’m not sure if I’m more scared of AI or its creators.
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There’s more news published every day than anyone could possibly keep up with. And depending on where you look, you can come away with a very different sense of which stories matter and what parts of them deserve the most attention.
That’s where Ground News comes in. It pulls together coverage from thousands of sources and groups reporting on the same story in one place, so you can see how outlets across the political spectrum are covering it without opening 15 different tabs.
One feature I like is Coverage Details, which shows you how many articles have been published about a story and gives you a better sense of just how much attention it’s getting across the media. You can also compare how that coverage breaks down across publications with different political leanings.
But, the Blindspot feed might be my favorite part. It highlights stories getting significant coverage from one side of the political spectrum and relatively little from the other. Spend enough time on it and you start spotting stories and differences in coverage you probably would have missed otherwise.
Ground News isn’t there to tell you what to think. It gives you a wider view of what’s being covered, how it’s being covered and where the gaps are, then lets you make up your own mind.
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At The Altar Of The Clanker
Imagine taking a stroll through San Francisco.
After crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, you stumble upon a gaggle of scrawny tech bros passing around a pack of Marlboros.
You’d expect these guys to be sucking on vape pens, but apparently old-fashioned cigarettes are making a comeback in Silicon Valley.
AI researchers have begun smoking cigs, at least according to Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar.
And they’re not lighting up because they want to star in the next Tips From Former Smokers campaign — they’re convinced artificial intelligence will cure cancer before cigarettes can kill them.
Treating your lungs like a disposable subscription service, confident that the next software update will fix them, is certainly a choice. But as bizarre as it sounds, the ideology behind this form of techno-worship is even more disturbing than the prospect of a bunch of programmers chain-smoking their way to immortality.
Meet the AI successionists: a collection of nerds who believe humanity’s greatest achievement will be engineering its own replacement.