AI is supposed to help militaries make precise strikes. Is that the case in Gaza? Israel’s war with Hamas, in response to the attacks of October 7, 2023, has led to more fatalities than in any previous Israeli war, with at least 34,000 Palestinians killed as of May 7, 2024. In Israel’s 2014 war in Gaza, just over 1,400 were killed. One factor in that difference is the use of artificial intelligence. Israel’s incorporation of AI in warfare has been public for years through both defensive and offensive weapons. But in this war, AI is being deployed differently: It’s generating bombing targets ..read more

AI-powered apps may be able to use your data (including selfies) to predict your current mental state. | Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images Emerging apps use AI to guess when you’ll be sad. Can they also help you feel better?  If you have a sore throat, you can get tested for a host of things — Covid, RSV, strep, the flu — and receive a pretty accurate diagnosis (and maybe even treatment). Even when you’re not sick, vital signs like heart rate and blood pressure give doctors a decent sense of your physical health. But there’s no agreed-upon vital sign for mental health. There may be o ..read more

There’s a significant impediment to maximizing CRISPR’s potential for developing novel therapies: the lack of diversity in genetics research. | Paige Vickers/Vox; Getty Images The genetic data that underpins CRISPR has a big diversity problem. Medicine has entered a new era in which scientists have the tools to change human genetics directly, creating the potential to treat or even permanently cure diseases by editing a few strands of troublesome DNA. And CRISPR, the gene-editing technology whose creators won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2020, is the face of this new normal. CRISPR’s novel ..read more

Andrew Huberman, a neurobiology professor and host of the Huberman Lab podcast, attending INBOUND 2023 in Boston, Mass. | Photo by Chance Yeh/Getty Images for HubSpot The Huberman Lab has credentials and millions of fans, but it sometimes oversteps medical fact. Sometimes, misleading information is easy to spot, traveling in the same conspiracy-theory-slicked grooves it has for decades. The same ideas that undermined belief in the safety of Covid-19 vaccines have been around for more than a century, adapting the same message to suit new media formats, new epidemics, and new influential endorse ..read more

Nude images shared without consent can be traumatic, whether they’re real or not. | Getty Images/iStockphoto How do you stop deepfake nudes? There’s a lot of debate about the role of technology in kids’ lives, but sometimes we come across something unequivocally bad. That’s the case with AI “nudification” apps, which teenagers are using to generate and share fake naked photos of their classmates. At Issaquah High School in Washington state, boys used an app to “strip” photos of girls who attended last fall’s homecoming dance, according to the New York Times. At Westfield High School in New Jer ..read more

Getty Images Derek Thompson on what the end of monoculture could mean for American democracy. Is damn near everything a cult now? That’s a glib distillation of an interesting idea I recently encountered. The basic thesis was that the internet has shattered the possibility of a monoculture and the result of that is a highly fragmented society that feels increasingly like a loose connection of cults stacked on top of each other. To say that everything is a cult is a bit of an overstatement, but as a general framework for understanding the world at the moment, it is helpful. The way we consume co ..read more

Photo illustration by Joe Raedle/Getty Images  The potential TikTok ban is now law. What happens next? The bill to require TikTok to separate from its Chinese parent company or face a nationwide ban made it to President Joe Biden’s desk on Wednesday as part of a huge foreign aid package that passed through Congress this week. And Biden, as he previously promised, signed the bill into law. ByteDance now has nine months to sell TikTok, a deadline that Biden can opt to extend once by 90 days. And while TikTok could avoid a ban with a successful sale or court challenge, the new law means Amer ..read more

Hollis Edmondson, age 7. | Paige Vickers/Vox; photos courtesy of Tracy Ross My 12-year-old daughter will inherit a warmer world — and, I fear, a lonelier one. When my son Hatcher and I started our hike down Idaho’s Middle Fork of the Salmon River during the fall of 2023, we feared what we might see. We were backpacking through our favorite place, the Frank Church–River of No Return Wilderness. It’s almost 2.4 million acres of central Idaho that shelters wolves, black bears, river otters, and lynx; the Salmon River threads through it for 200 breathtaking miles. One of America’s longest free-flo ..read more

Getty Images The internet is far less secure than it ought to be. One of the most fascinating and frightening incidents in computer security history started in 2022 with a few pushy emails to the mailing list for a small, one-person open source project. A user had submitted a complex bit of code that was now waiting for the maintainer to review. But a different user with the name Jigar Kumar felt that this wasn’t happening fast enough. “Patches spend years on this mailing list,” he complained. “5.2.0 release was 7 years ago. There is no reason to think anything is coming soon.”. A month later ..read more

The Zoomer tween in their natural habitat. | Leon Neal/Getty Images Did smartphones actually “destroy” a generation? The kids are not all right — and the device you are probably reading this on is to blame. So argues the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. In his new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, Haidt insists that smartphones and social media are fueling a “surge of suffering” that’s inundating teens all across the Western world. By Haidt’s account, smartphones and the addicting social media apps we download onto th ..read more