Is AI Really Going to Change Everything? Let's Find Out.
Browse articles on artificial intelligence and the future of work. For anyone worried about automation, with varied, regularly updated perspectives.
Why New Yorkers Are Googling “Afraid of AI” More Than Anyone Else New Yorkers are searching for AI-related fears at rates 42.6% above the national average, with deepfake queries exceeding 14,000 monthly searches. A Siena Poll found 43% of New Yorkers believe AI’s disadvantages outweigh its advantages. The fear is driven by job displacement risks—particularly … Read more
What Is the Risk of Autonomous Weapons? The core risk of autonomous weapons is the removal of meaningful human control over the use of lethal force. Machines that select and kill targets without human authorization risk violating international humanitarian law, escalating conflicts through machine-speed miscalculation, evading accountability for unlawful killings, and lowering the threshold for … Read more
AI Checker Tools: Are You Afraid Your Writing Will Get Flagged? Yes—and the fear is evidence-based. AI detectors produce false positive rates ranging from 0.05% to 68.6%, with non-native English writers flagged at rates exceeding 60%. Turnitin’s own one percent false positive rate translates to roughly 750 wrongly accused students at a single university. These … Read more
What Types of Jobs Will AI Affect the Most in 2026? Computer programmers, customer service representatives, and data entry keyers face the highest AI exposure in 2026, with 67-75% of their tasks potentially automatable. Clerical and administrative roles are most vulnerable. Jobs requiring physical presence, complex social interaction, or hands-on care—such as healthcare workers, electricians, … Read more
Why Is It Getting Harder to Know What’s Real Online? It’s getting harder to know what’s real online because generative AI tools now produce human-indistinguishable images, audio, and video at near-zero cost. Research shows humans perform only slightly better than chance at detecting AI-generated content. Meanwhile, detection tools remain unreliable, and regulatory labeling is only … Read more
Could AI Be Used to Manipulate an Election? Yes — AI is already being used to manipulate elections. Documented examples include the 2024 New Hampshire Biden robocall, Slovakia’s 2023 deepfake audio, Hungary’s 2026 AI disinformation campaign, and the 2026 NRSC deepfake of a Texas Senate candidate. However, experts say no election has yet been conclusively … Read more
Is That Photo Real or Made by AI? How to Check You can check if a photo is AI-generated by zooming in on hands, teeth, eyes, and background text for anatomical errors; examining shadows and reflections for physics violations; running the image through detection tools like AI or Not, Hive, or Sightengine; and checking for … Read more
How Can You Tell If a Video Is a Deepfake? You can spot many deepfakes by watching for unnatural blinking, mismatched lip-sync, distorted hands and ears, inconsistent lighting, and physics errors like objects appearing or disappearing. AI detection tools like NVIDIA’s Synthetic Video Detector and Sensity AI can flag fakes in milliseconds, but compression and … Read more
Why Does AI Feel So Unpredictable Sometimes? AI feels unpredictable because it generates outputs by sampling from probability distributions rather than following fixed rules. Floating-point rounding errors, temperature settings, long reasoning chains, and training incentives that reward guessing over admitting uncertainty all cause the same prompt to produce different answers. This is a structural property … Read more
Is There Any Way to “Turn Off” AI If Something Goes Wrong? There is no single “off switch” for modern AI. AI systems run across multiple servers, data centers, and cloud providers — there is no one plug to pull. Companies can shut down individual servers, revoke credentials, or terminate agent sessions, but a truly … Read more