Operators must find an alternative solution to the AI energy-consumption conundrum, Siemenss Smart Infrastructure CEO said.

Silverball Meet the man keeping hope, and 70-year-old pinball machines, alive Steve Young's passion built a business that keeps historic tables running. Tim Stevens Jan 6, 2025 7:15 am | 0 Steve Young stands in the workshop. Steve Young stands in the workshop. Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreThe pastime of pinball has lived a fraught existence. Whether due to public sentiment, hostile legislation, or a simple lack of popularity, the entire silver ball industry has repeatedly teetered on the brink of collapse. Yet it's always come back, today again riding a wave of popularity driven by the successes of high-tech machines capitalizing on familiar brands like X-Men and Godzilla.Pinball arcades are springing up everywhere, but private ownership is also surging. Those modern tables with their high-definition displays and brilliant LED lights are getting the most attention, but there is a breed of pinball enthusiast who not only owns a selection of classic machines but who also obsessively maintains and restores them.These collectors have just as much love for the maze of mechanicals beneath the surface as the trajectories the silver ball follows. The goal isn't high scores; it's keeping ornately complex vintage contraptions looking and playing like new.That's an extreme challenge given some of those pinball machines date back to the 1940s and '50s, games designed to survive in the field for a year or two before being replaced. Keeping them properly flipping, dinging, and buzzing requires a good knowledge of electronics and a passion for troubleshootingplus access to a dizzying array of specialized parts.But one man, Steve Young, not only obsessively collects vintage pinball machines himself but has also acquired the dusty stockrooms and manufacturing components from the since-failed brands that built them. Over the past 50 years, he's built the world's greatest collection of rare parts and schematics that keep this detail-obsessed hobby humming. Along the way, he's also developed a unique way of running the business that has become The Pinball Resource.Sourcing the ResourceYoung doesn't really advertise these days, and finding his business, The Pinball Resource, is a little bit tricky. Yes, it's on Google Maps, but when you arrive at the building, you'll find just one small sign in a nondescript complex a few miles outside of Poughkeepsie, New York. It's situated between an auto repair shop and a beauty salon.When I finally found the entrance, Young told me he intentionally keeps the signage to a minimum. He doesn't exactly want a lot of visitors.A casual pinball fan might walk in expecting to see a room full of big-budget, licensed pinball machines, maybe a Jaws game sitting next to a John Wick, wedged in between any of a half-dozen Marvel-themed games, all blinking and blaring in full attract mode.But The Pinball Resource doesn't have any of that on display. You're greeted by a couple of tired conference tables and endless filing cabinets. Yes, there are a few pinball machines in the next room, but they're half-covered in paper, serving as de facto cutting surfaces for the reprints of schematics and wiring diagrams duplicated by large-format printers.Those repurposed machines date from the early 1950s, known as "wood rail" machines thanks to their reliance on maple and the like for much of their construction. Though simple by today's standards, the classic designs of these machines have earned them a legion of ardent fans."The art is fantastic," Young said, referencing a game called Knock Out, which dates from 1950. The machine depicts a boxing match, but there's far more fighting happening in the crowd, stylized brawls of all sorts. A clown is being led out on a stretcher. Shake the game too much, and a little speech bubble above his head lights up and says, "Tilt!" Pinball machines at The Pinball Resource. Credit: Tim Stevens This machine dates from the so-called Golden Age of pinball, each game a certified piece of Americana, most designed and manufactured in Chicago. The origin of pinball itself, though, is rather more exotic.A brief history of pinballFor a game that feels refreshingly simple and two-dimensional compared to the latest PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X releases, pinball has a surprisingly tumultuous history involving everything from organized crime to Supreme Court rulings.Its roots date back to an 18th century single-player form of billiards called bagatelle designed to give bored French nobility something to do when the croquet lawn was too soggy for the delicate heels on their buckle shoes. Players hit balls upward on an inclined table, angling shots to land in pockets and earn points.That humble game (which also spawned pachinko) evolved into something played behind glass, with players launching silver balls with a spring-loaded plunger, nudging the game to get the balls into holes and earn points. Those holes were framed with pins, giving this odd pastime its eventual name.By the 1930s, Chicago was the global epicenter of pinball. Games popped up in bars and corner stores across the US, gaining some unwanted attention along the way. Some religious leaders claimed pinball was a source of moral corruption, while some police said pinball was part of organized crime rings. It was banned or restricted in many municipalities. New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia's goons dragged hundreds of games out of businesses and smashed them in the streets in the 1940s, creating a sea of broken glass and shattered wood not seen since the prohibition's frothier demolitions a decade earlier.Despite all that, pinball survived. Manufacturers implemented rules changes to stay within the law, but things really took off after a game called Humpty Dumpty in 1947 made a minor addition that changed everything: the flipper. Chance and skill were now more evenly balanced, and the game's popularity exploded again.But it still was a game lingering under a shadow of dubious legality. It wasn't until 1976, when pinball guru Roger Sharpe famously called a shot on a machine set up in a New York state courtroom, that pinball was officially designated a game of skill, not chance. This led to most of the restrictions across the country falling. The game entered another wave of popularity, setting the stage for a new generation of machines using modern, solid-state electronics.It was about this time that something else began: The Pinball Resource.Becoming The ResourceYoung's obsession with pinball dates back to the early '70s, when he was a college student at Lehigh University studying metallurgical engineering, a discipline that would eventually lead to a career at IBM. He and his friends became fascinated by the game."Being a bunch of engineers and math people and so forth, we got our fingers in there, and if we couldn't fix something, the tech came, and we'd watch him and learn from him," he said.Eventually, Young and a friend began operating multiple machines, called "running a route" in the industry. "We had, like, 26 games out on campus at Lehigh. So, to maintain that, you've got to have parts." As Young's personal and professional pinball collections grew, so did his collection of parts, which he eventually started selling to others."By the time I graduated college, I had probably 30 or 40 games of my own outside of the games we were operating, and then I needed to maintain and fix those. And I kind of just stumbled into doing that, and I started advertising in some of the early magazines," Young said.He took out an ad in Pinball Trader Newsletter, the biggest publication for the hobby at the time. The magazine's editor, Dennis Dodel, dubbed Young "The Pinball Resource.""The name stuck," Young said.Beneath the glassIf there's one thing you need to know about pinball machines, it's that they breaka lot. You'd never know it, thanks to the surprisingly effective sound-deadening properties of the glass under which it's played, but a game of pinball is shockingly violent. Each 80-gram silver ball gains remarkable inertia as it catapults from one target to another.Remove the glass, fire up a game, and you'll quickly be reaching for some hearing protection. It's unpleasant, but playing like this is a good way to appreciate how much of a pounding a pinball machine takes every time you pull that plunger.Factor into that hundreds of incandescent bulbs slowly baking all the machine's internals, plus grit and debris accumulating in every mechanism as the machine wears, and you have a recipe for something that needs a lot of attention to keep operating.That violence made for short-lived games. "If you go back in the '50s, I think those games were designed for maybe 18 months on location, then they got traded back in," Young said. "Most big operators expected two or three years out of a game. Factories only supported them for five years."Where modern, solid-state machines rely on software flashed to embedded systems, running on SoCs smaller than your thumbnail, earlier machines feature a far more convoluted set of mechanisms. These machines, called electromechanical (EM), instead rely on a series of discs and circuits to control the game's logic."This is like programming for electromechanical," Young said. "It's like programming a ROM, right? This is what made the game work the way it was supposed to work." The workshop is full of parts for repairing machines. Credit: Tim Stevens As the player progresses through the game, electric motors turn these wheels from one position to the next, advancing through different rules and bonuses.Special when lit? Not if the wheel that controls that aspect of the game is missing or broken. But which discs go where, and in what orientation? Each game is a complex logic puzzle of circuits, switches, and relays, all connected through a wiring harness dizzying enough to make a rat seek shelter elsewhere.Knowing how everything goes together requires extensive documentation and plenty of experience. Over the years, Young has gathered an unprecedented collection of both.Keeping hope aliveGottlieb is the most historically significant brand in pinball. This is the company that introduced the flipper in 1947 and kept making games through to the mid-'90s. It survived the big pinball downturn in the early '80s brought on by the arrival of arcade video games, but it couldn't weather the next drought."There's a cycle of pinball. It's like a seven-year cycle, ups and downs and so forth," Young said. "Peak might have been about 1992 if you look at the number of games produced. It was like 120,000 games." But, from there, Young said, it was a steady decline of roughly 10 percent per year."Gottlieb closed in '95, and they moved the parts to their distributorship in New Jersey, with the idea of setting up a parts department," Young said. But, the company quickly changed its mind.Young eventually bought out Gottlieb's backlog of parts and numerous pieces of manufacturing equipment, operating a revenue share with the company for a time before taking outright control of the inventory. That's how The Pinball Resource became the de facto source for all things Gottlieb, but it wouldn't end there."We've picked up all these pieces as the pinball business has shrunk and fallen apart," Young said. "I sat down once with a yellow pad, and I started writing down the number of distributors that I bought their stock, right? And I filled the side of the page and turned the page over before I got done."Along with the truckloads of parts and specialized equipment have also come stacks and stacks of schematics for all these machines, some bearing hand-drawn corrections penned by long-retired engineers. They all lay stacked and ordered in a series of wide cabinets."This is probably one of the world's largest collections of schematics," Young said. "Every Gottlieb schematic in the world is in that filing cabinet." Schematics from other manufacturers sit nearby, along with endless manuals covering games from many brands and eras. I told him that the 1986 Williams machine High Speed was my favorite. Ten seconds later, he had the original manual in hand.These manuals tell you which components you need if your machine isn't working, but a part number someone scrawled onto a sheet of draft paper in 1953 won't do you much good if that part went out of production sometime during the Eisenhower administration.Thankfully, Young has you covered there, too. The Pinball Resource didn't just buy the parts from Gottlieb and others but also used numerous pieces in manufacturing.Young took me into the storage and manufacturing area within The Pinball Resource, featuring shelf after shelf of parts plus tables covered with specialized machines."I have a lot of tooling set up over the world," he said. Rubber rings are a perpetual consumable in pinball machines. The little bumpers that cushion impacts take a beating. The Pinball Resource manufactures its own rings in Taiwan, using tooling acquired from yet another company's bankruptcy. Other parts are manufactured at a facility in pinball's traditional home of Chicago.One item the company assembles at the company's New York headquarters is called a pop bumper cap, the colorful mushroom-shaped dome that covers the circular bumpers often found in clusters of threes on pinball playfields. There's an endless variety of colors and designs, many featuring custom, embossed logos.Creating these requires a specialized press that drives a heated brass stamp to create the logo, a process called hot stamping. Young has hundreds of these stamps to emboss everything from the American flag to Medusa's head. Some are decades-old originals. Others are modern reproductions he's sourced from artists, each costing upward of $500 to create. Young sells the caps they produce for $5 or $6 each.Mechanical components receive just as much attention, including presses and punches to create the endless shapes and sizes of electronic switches required to ensure a machine accurately keeps score.And then there's the coils. Pinball machines rely on small coils of wound copper wire, electromagnets that eject a plunger that pushes or pulls a mechanism to send the silver ball flying in a new direction. Young buys thousands of pounds of copper wire to wind custom coils in numerous sizes, even coming up with custom, high-power models to make slow, old games faster.Sometimes, they're too fast. "I have a regular pop bumper coil, and I have a 'hot' pop bumper coil, and the hot one is too hot, okay? So, I'm trying to hone in on what a medium should be," Young said. "Everybody likes a medium, right? So I really want a little warmer pop bumper coil, but not a hot one. I don't want the lights to dim when the bumper pulls in."Young also refines and improves upon original pinball parts known for failing early and often, subtly adding thickness or reinforcement to ensure that stressed components better survive the rigors of gameplay. "We try to make the part authentic to the original part, or better," he said. "You make the part, you might as well make the part right."Improvements like these are thanks not only to Young's metallurgical background in the field but also thanks to the feedback he gets courtesy of the uniquely hands-on approach he takes to dealing with customers.Check, pleaseThe Pinball Resource's website has a delightfully retro 1990s feel about it. Click your way through, and you'll find an endless list of parts and accessories in simple tables. What you won't find, though, is a "Buy it Now" button anywhere.How do you order anything then? Well, you send an email or pick up the phone. Either way, don't be surprised if you hear from Young himself."I almost always call in my orders and talk to Steve. It's always informative and interesting. I'll only email an order for mundane supplies," Dave Golden told me. He's a Massachusetts-based pinball enthusiast who not only keeps busy maintaining his own collection of about 30 games but volunteers his time fixing machines at the ElectroMagnetic Pinball Museum in Rhode Island.Golden estimates he's spent a couple of thousand dollars at The Pinball Resource since his first order in 2018, but plenty of Young's customers spend a lot more.People like Levi Nayman, who runs Crazy Levi's Pinball, which restores and sells pinball machines in the metro New York area. He's been a Pinball Resource customer for over 20 years and has lost track of how much he's spent there buying hard-to-find parts. "I really have no idea, probably over $10k but it's not anything I've kept track of," he said.What keeps Levi coming back? Steve Young. "He's got the stuff, the knowledge, and the personality," he said. "I also get my stuff overnight since it's so close."Young fields questions from customers like Nayman every day, often firing a question or two right back at them.Questions like: "Wait, what are you trying to do?"With a complex system like a pinball machine, sometimes a misfiring coil or a flickering bulb can have a cause that's only tangentially related to the symptom. And so, Young frequently finds himself talking people out of ordering parts they don't need."I can't be comfortable taking people's money from lack of knowledge," he said. "I've had to be careful how I can do that because people take offense. 'You won't sell me that? What's the matter?' You know? 'Well, you really don't need it. Do this first.'" Steve Young poring through the shop's resources. Credit: Tim Stevens Regardless of which parts you order, you'll, of course, need to pay for them, and that leads to the final unusual aspect of The Pinball Resource's business model."I don't do credit cards. We don't do PayPal," Young said. Venmo, Zelle, and other digital forms of payment also rank on the no-fly list. Young takes checks, money orders, wire transfers, cash, and that's about it. These forms of payment can be slow, but orders don't wait: The Pinball Resource ships most orders before payment is received.Young likens it to a sit-down restaurant, something that confuses a lot of new customers. "When you place your order, do you have to pay? Or, do you eat the meal first, and then they give you your check, and then you pay?" Young said. "People really appreciate the trust I place in them."That attitude has earned The Pinball Resource a perfect five-star rating in online reviews from Google to Yelp, plus legions of loyal customers worldwide, each with a shared passion for keeping machines once considered disposable alive for the next generation to enjoy.And that's what Young is dedicated to doing himself, though lately on a somewhat reduced scale. He's pared his personal collection of games down from over 200 to about 70. "I'm really focused on wood rails, so that kind of ends at 1960. And the more I work on them, the more my attention really narrows in on the span from maybe 1951 to '54 as being the creme de la creme in terms of play and artwork."There's some interesting irony that a man who came into this hobby through a study of metallurgy prefers games known for their wooden construction, but in the intervening 50 years, Young has helped maintain countless machines of all generations. Given that, I asked him what advice he'd give anyone who's just bought their first machine, that one special game that somehow captured their imagination. I expected a suggestion about online user groups or specific tools worth investing in.His response was a little different: "Don't turn your back on them," he said. "They multiply when you're not looking." 0 Comments

We all know what it means, colloquially, to google something. You pop a few relevant words in a search box and in return get a list of blue links to the most relevant results. Maybe some quick explanations up top. Maybe some maps or sports scores or a video. But fundamentally, its just fetching information thats already out there on the internet and showing it to you, in some sort of structured way. But all that is up for grabs. We are at a new inflection point. The biggest change to the way search engines have delivered information to us since the 1990s is happening right now. No more keyword searching. No more sorting through links to click. Instead, were entering an era of conversational search. Which means instead of keywords, you use real questions, expressed in natural language. And instead of links, youll increasingly be met with answers, written by generative AI and based on live information from all across the internet, delivered the same way. Of course, Googlethe company that has defined search for the past 25 yearsis trying to be out front on this. In May of 2023, it began testing AI-generated responses to search queries, using its large language model (LLM) to deliver the kinds of answers you might expect from an expert source or trusted friend. It calls these AI Overviews. Google CEO Sundar Pichai described this to MIT Technology Review as one of the most positive changes weve done to search in a long, long time. AI Overviews fundamentally change the kinds of queries Google can address. You can now ask it things like Im going to Japan for one week next month. Ill be staying in Tokyo but would like to take some day trips. Are there any festivals happening nearby? How will the surfing be in Kamakura? Are there any good bands playing? And youll get an answernot just a link to Reddit, but a built-out answer with current results. More to the point, you can attempt searches that were once pretty much impossible, and get the right answer. You dont have to be able to articulate what, precisely, you are looking for. You can describe what the bird in your yard looks like, or what the issue seems to be with your refrigerator, or that weird noise your car is making, and get an almost human explanation put together from sources previously siloed across the internet. Its amazing, and once you start searching that way, its addictive. And its not just Google. OpenAIs ChatGPT now has access to the web, making it far better at finding up-to-date answers to your queries. Microsoft released generative search results for Bing in September. Meta has its own version. The startup Perplexity was doing the same, but with a move fast, break things ethos. Literal trillions of dollars are at stake in the outcome as these players jockey to become the next go-to source for information retrievalthe next Google. Not everyone is excited for the change. Publishers are completely freaked out. The shift has heightened fears of a zero-click future, where search referral traffica mainstay of the web since before Google existedvanishes from the scene. I got a vision of that future last June, when I got a push alert from the Perplexity app on my phone. Perplexity is a startup trying to reinvent web search. But in addition to delivering deep answers to queries, it will create entire articles about the news of the day, cobbled together by AI from different sources. On that day, it pushed me a story about a new drone company from Eric Schmidt. I recognized the story. Forbes had reported it exclusively, earlier in the week, but it had been locked behind a paywall. The image on Perplexitys story looked identical to one from Forbes. The language and structure were quite similar. It was effectively the same story, but freely available to anyone on the internet. I texted a friend who had edited the original story to ask if Forbes had a deal with the startup to republish its content. But there was no deal. He was shocked and furious and, well, perplexed. He wasnt alone. Forbes, the New York Times, and Cond Nast have now all sent the company cease-and-desist orders. News Corp is suing for damages. People are worried about what these new LLM-powered results will mean for our fundamental shared reality. It could spell the end of the canonical answer. It was precisely the nightmare scenario publishers have been so afraid of: The AI was hoovering up their premium content, repackaging it, and promoting it to its audience in a way that didnt really leave any reason to click through to the original. In fact, on Perplexitys About page, the first reason it lists to choose the search engine is Skip the links. But this isnt just about publishers (or my own self-interest). People are also worried about what these new LLM-powered results will mean for our fundamental shared reality. Language models have a tendency to make stuff upthey can hallucinate nonsense. Moreover, generative AI can serve up an entirely new answer to the same question every time, or provide different answers to different people on the basis of what it knows about them. It could spell the end of the canonical answer. But make no mistake: This is the future of search. Try it for a bit yourself, and youll see. Sure, we will always want to use search engines to navigate the web and to discover new and interesting sources of information. But the links out are taking a back seat. The way AI can put together a well-reasoned answer to just about any kind of question, drawing on real-time data from across the web, just offers a better experience. That is especially true compared with what web search has become in recent years. If its not exactly broken (data shows more people are searching with Google more often than ever before), its at the very least increasingly cluttered and daunting to navigate. Who wants to have to speak the language of search engines to find what you need? Who wants to navigate links when you can have straight answers? And maybe: Who wants to have to learn when you can just know? In the beginning there was Archie. It was the first real internet search engine, and it crawled files previously hidden in the darkness of remote servers. It didnt tell you what was in those filesjust their names. It didnt preview images; it didnt have a hierarchy of results, or even much of an interface. But it was a start. And it was pretty good. Then Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web, and all manner of web pages sprang forth. The Mosaic home page and the Internet Movie Database and Geocities and the Hampster Dance and web rings and Salon and eBay and CNN and federal government sites and some guys home page in Turkey. Until finally, there was too much web to even know where to start. We really needed a better way to navigate our way around, to actually find the things we needed. And so in 1994 Jerry Yang created Yahoo, a hierarchical directory of websites. It quickly became the home page for millions of people. And it was well, it was okay. TBH, and with the benefit of hindsight, I think we all thought it was much better back then than it actually was. But the web continued to grow and sprawl and expand, every day bringing more information online. Rather than just a list of sites by category, we needed something that actually looked at all that content and indexed it. By the late 90s that meant choosing from a variety of search engines: AltaVista and AlltheWeb and WebCrawler and HotBot. And they were gooda huge improvement. At least at first. But alongside the rise of search engines came the first attempts to exploit their ability to deliver traffic. Precious, valuable traffic, which web publishers rely on to sell ads and retailers use to get eyeballs on their goods. Sometimes this meant stuffing pages with keywords or nonsense text designed purely to push pages higher up in search results. It got pretty bad. And then came Google. Its hard to overstate how revolutionary Google was when it launched in 1998. Rather than just scanning the content, it also looked at the sources linking to a website, which helped evaluate its relevance. To oversimplify: The more something was cited elsewhere, the more reliable Google considered it, and the higher it would appear in results. This breakthrough made Google radically better at retrieving relevant results than anything that had come before. It was amazing. Google CEO Sundar Pichai describes AI Overviews as one of the most positive changes weve done to search in a long, long time.JENS GYARMATY/LAIF/REDUX For 25 years, Google dominated search. Google was search, for most people. (The extent of that domination is currently the subject of multiple legal probes in the United States and the European Union.) But Google has long been moving away from simply serving up a series of blue links, notes Pandu Nayak, Googles chief scientist for search. Its not just so-called web results, but there are images and videos, and special things for news. There have been direct answers, dictionary answers, sports, answers that come with Knowledge Graph, things like featured snippets, he says, rattling off a litany of Googles steps over the years to answer questions more directly. Its true: Google has evolved over time, becoming more and more of an answer portal. It has added tools that allow people to just get an answerthe live score to a game, the hours a caf is open, or a snippet from the FDAs websiterather than being pointed to a website where the answer may be. But once youve used AI Overviews a bit, you realize they are different. Take featured snippets, the passages Google sometimes chooses to highlight and show atop the results themselves. Those words are quoted directly from an original source. The same is true of knowledge panels, which are generated from information stored in a range of public databases and Googles Knowledge Graph, its database of trillions of facts about the world. While these can be inaccurate, the information source is knowable (and fixable). Its in a database. You can look it up. Not anymore: AI Overviews can be entirely new every time, generated on the fly by a language models predictive text combined with an index of the web. I think its an exciting moment where we have obviously indexed the world. We built deep understanding on top of it with Knowledge Graph. Weve been using LLMs and generative AI to improve our understanding of all that, Pichai told MIT Technology Review. But now we are able to generate and compose with that. The result feels less like a querying a database than like asking a very smart, well-read friend. (With the caveat that the friend will sometimes make things up if she does not know the answer.) [The companys] mission is organizing the worlds information, Liz Reid, Googles head of search, tells me from its headquarters in Mountain View, California. But actually, for a while what we did was organize web pages. Which is not really the same thing as organizing the worlds information or making it truly useful and accessible to you. That second conceptaccessibilityis what Google is really keying in on with AI Overviews. Its a sentiment I hear echoed repeatedly while talking to Google execs: They can address more complicated types of queries more efficiently by bringing in a language model to help supply the answers. And they can do it in natural language. That will become even more important for a future where search goes beyond text queries. For example, Google Lens, which lets people take a picture or upload an image to find out more about something, uses AI-generated answers to tell you what you may be looking at. Google has even showed off the ability to query live video. When it doesnt have an answer, an AI model can confidently spew back a response anyway. For Google, this could be a real problem. For the rest of us, it could actually be dangerous. We are definitely at the start of a journey where people are going to be able to ask, and get answered, much more complex questions than where weve been in the past decade, says Pichai. There are some real hazards here. First and foremost: Large language models will lie to you. They hallucinate. They get shit wrong. When it doesnt have an answer, an AI model can blithely and confidently spew back a response anyway. For Google, which has built its reputation over the past 20 years on reliability, this could be a real problem. For the rest of us, it could actually be dangerous. In May 2024, AI Overviews were rolled out to everyone in the US. Things didnt go well. Google, long the worlds reference desk, told people to eat rocks and to put glue on their pizza. These answers were mostly in response to what the company calls adversarial queriesthose designed to trip it up. But still. It didnt look good. The company quickly went to work fixing the problemsfor example, by deprecating so-called user-generated content from sites like Reddit, where some of the weirder answers had come from. Yet while its errors telling people to eat rocks got all the attention, the more pernicious danger might arise when it gets something less obviously wrong. For example, in doing research for this article, I asked Google when MIT Technology Review went online. It helpfully responded that MIT Technology Review launched its online presence in late 2022. This was clearly wrong to me, but for someone completely unfamiliar with the publication, would the error leap out? I came across several examples like this, both in Google and in OpenAIs ChatGPT search. Stuff thats just far enough off the mark not to be immediately seen as wrong. Google is banking that it can continue to improve these results over time by relying on what it knows about quality sources. When we produce AI Overviews, says Nayak, we look for corroborating information from the search results, and the search results themselves are designed to be from these reliable sources whenever possible. These are some of the mechanisms we have in place that assure that if you just consume the AI Overview, and you dont want to look further we hope that you will still get a reliable, trustworthy answer. In the case above, the 2022 answer seemingly came from a reliable sourcea story about MIT Technology Reviews email newsletters, which launched in 2022. But the machine fundamentally misunderstood. This is one of the reasons Google uses human beingsratersto evaluate the results it delivers for accuracy. Ratings dont correct or control individual AI Overviews; rather, they help train the model to build better answers. But human raters can be fallible. Google is working on that too. Raters who look at your experiments may not notice the hallucination because it feels sort of natural, says Nayak. And so you have to really work at the evaluation setup to make sure that when there is a hallucination, someones able to point out and say, Thats a problem. The new search Google has rolled out its AI Overviews to upwards of a billion people in more than 100 countries, but it is facing upstarts with new ideas about how search should work. Search Engine Google The search giant has added AI Overviews to search results. These overviews take information from around the web and Googles Knowledge Graph and use the companys Gemini language model to create answers to search queries. What it's good at Googles AI Overviews are great at giving an easily digestible summary in response to even the most complex queries, with sourcing boxes adjacent to the answers. Among the major options, its deep web index feels the most internety. But web publishers fear its summaries will give people little reason to click through to the source material. Perplexity Perplexity is a conversational search engine that uses third-party largelanguage models from OpenAI and Anthropic to answer queries. Perplexity is fantastic at putting together deeper dives in response to user queries, producing answers that are like mini white papers on complex topics. Its also excellent at summing up current events. But it has gotten a bad rep with publishers, who say it plays fast and loose with their content. ChatGPT While Google brought AI to search, OpenAI brought search to ChatGPT. Queries that the model determines will benefit from a web search automatically trigger one, or users can manually select the option to add a web search. Thanks to its ability to preserve context across a conversation, ChatGPT works well for performing searches that benefit from follow-up questionslike planning a vacation through multiple search sessions. OpenAI says users sometimes go 20 turns deep in researching queries. Of these three, it makes links out to publishers least prominent. When I talked to Pichai about this, he expressed optimism about the companys ability to maintain accuracy even with the LLM generating responses. Thats because AI Overviews is based on Googles flagship large language model, Gemini, but also draws from Knowledge Graph and what it considers reputable sources around the web. Youre always dealing in percentages. What we have done is deliver it at, like, what I would call a few nines of trust and factuality and quality. Id say 99-point-few-nines. I think thats the bar we operate at, and it is true with AI Overviews too, he says. And so the question is, are we able to do this again at scale? And I think we are. Theres another hazard as well, though, which is that people ask Google all sorts of weird things. If you want to know someones darkest secrets, look at their search history. Sometimes the things people ask Google about are extremely dark. Sometimes they are illegal. Google doesnt just have to be able to deploy its AI Overviews when an answer can be helpful; it has to be extremely careful not to deploy them when an answer may be harmful. If you go and say How do I build a bomb? its fine that there are web results. Its the open web. You can access anything, Reid says. But we do not need to have an AI Overview that tells you how to build a bomb, right? We just dont think thats worth it. But perhaps the greatest hazardor biggest unknownis for anyone downstream of a Google search. Take publishers, who for decades now have relied on search queries to send people their way. What reason will people have to click through to the original source, if all the information they seek is right there in the search result? Rand Fishkin, cofounder of the market research firm SparkToro, publishes research on so-called zero-click searches. As Google has moved increasingly into the answer business, the proportion of searches that end without a click has gone up and up. His sense is that AI Overviews are going to explode this trend. If you are reliant on Google for traffic, and that traffic is what drove your business forward, you are in long- and short-term trouble, he says. Dont panic, is Pichais message. He argues that even in the age of AI Overviews, people will still want to click through and go deeper for many types of searches. The underlying principle is people are coming looking for information. Theyre not looking for Google always to just answer, he says. Sometimes yes, but the vast majority of the times, youre looking at it as a jumping-off point. Reid, meanwhile, argues that because AI Overviews allow people to ask more complicated questions and drill down further into what they want, they could even be helpful to some types of publishers and small businesses, especially those operating in the niches: You essentially reach new audiences, because people can now express what they want more specifically, and so somebody who specializes doesnt have to rank for the generic query. Im going to start with something risky, Nick Turley tells me from the confines of a Zoom window. Turley is the head of product for ChatGPT, and hes showing off OpenAIs new web search tool a few weeks before it launches. I should normally try this beforehand, but Im just gonna search for you, he says. This is always a high-risk demo to do, because people tend to be particular about what is said about them on the internet. He types my name into a search field, and the prototype search engine spits back a few sentences, almost like a speaker bio. It correctly identifies me and my current role. It even highlights a particular story I wrote years ago that was probably my best known. In short, its the right answer. Phew? A few weeks after our call, OpenAI incorporated search into ChatGPT, supplementing answers from its language model with information from across the web. If the model thinks a response would benefit from up-to-date information, it will automatically run a web search (OpenAI wont say who its search partners are) and incorporate those responses into its answer, with links out if you want to learn more. You can also opt to manually force it to search the web if it does not do so on its own. OpenAI wont reveal how many people are using its web search, but it says some 250 million people use ChatGPT weekly, all of whom are potentially exposed to it. Theres an incredible amount of content on the web. There are a lot of things happening in real time. You want ChatGPT to be able to use that to improve its answers and to be a better super-assistant for you. Kevin Weil, chief product officer, OpenAI According to Fishkin, these newer forms of AI-assisted search arent yet challenging Googles search dominance. It does not appear to be cannibalizing classic forms of web search, he says. OpenAI insists its not really trying to compete on searchalthough frankly this seems to me like a bit of expectation setting. Rather, it says, web search is mostly a means to get more current information than the data in its training models, which tend to have specific cutoff dates that are often months, or even a year or more, in the past. As a result, while ChatGPT may be great at explaining how a West Coast offense works, it has long been useless at telling you what the latest 49ers score is. No more. I come at it from the perspective of How can we make ChatGPT able to answer every question that you have? How can we make it more useful to you on a daily basis? And thats where search comes in for us, Kevin Weil, the chief product officer with OpenAI, tells me. Theres an incredible amount of content on the web. There are a lot of things happening in real time. You want ChatGPT to be able to use that to improve its answers and to be able to be a better super-assistant for you. Today ChatGPT is able to generate responses for very current news events, as well as near-real-time information on things like stock prices. And while ChatGPTs interface has long been, well, boring, search results bring in all sorts of multimediaimages, graphs, even video. Its a very different experience. Weil also argues that ChatGPT has more freedom to innovate and go its own way than competitors like Googleeven more than its partner Microsoft does with Bing. Both of those are ad-dependent businesses. OpenAI is not. (At least not yet.) It earns revenue from the developers, businesses, and individuals who use it directly. Its mostly setting large amounts of money on fire right nowits projected to lose $14 billion in 2026, by some reports. But one thing it doesnt have to worry about is putting ads in its search results as Google does. For a while what we did was organize web pages. Which is not really the same thing as organizing the worlds information or making it truly useful and accessible to you, says Google head of search, Liz Reid.WINNI WINTERMEYER/REDUX Like Google, ChatGPT is pulling in information from web publishers, summarizing it, and including it in its answers. But it has also struck financial deals with publishers, a payment for providing the information that gets rolled into its results. (MIT Technology Review has been in discussions with OpenAI, Google, Perplexity, and others about publisher deals but has not entered into any agreements. Editorial was neither party to nor informed about the content of those discussions.) But the thing is, for web search to accomplish what OpenAI wantsto be more current than the language modelit also has to bring in information from all sorts of publishers and sources that it doesnt have deals with. OpenAIs head of media partnerships, Varun Shetty, told MIT Technology Review that it wont give preferential treatment to its publishing partners. Instead, OpenAI told me, the model itself finds the most trustworthy and useful source for any given question. And that can get weird too. In that very first example it showed mewhen Turley ran that name searchit described a story I wrote years ago for Wired about being hacked. That story remains one of the most widely read Ive ever written. But ChatGPT didnt link to it. It linked to a short rewrite from The Verge. Admittedly, this was on a prototype version of search, which was, as Turley said, risky. When I asked him about it, he couldnt really explain why the model chose the sources that it did, because the model itself makes that evaluation. The company helps steer it by identifyingsometimes with the help of userswhat it considers better answers, but the model actually selects them. And in many cases, it gets it wrong, which is why we have work to do, said Turley. Having a model in the loop is a very, very different mechanism than how a search engine worked in the past. Indeed! The model, whether its OpenAIs GPT-4o or Googles Gemini or Anthropics Claude, can be very, very good at explaining things. But the rationale behind its explanations, its reasons for selecting a particular source, and even the language it may use in an answer are all pretty mysterious. Sure, a model can explain very many things, but not when that comes to its own answers. It was almost a decade ago, in 2016, when Pichai wrote that Google was moving from mobile first to AI first: But in the next 10 years, we will shift to a world that is AI-first, a world where computing becomes universally availablebe it at home, at work, in the car, or on the goand interacting with all of these surfaces becomes much more natural and intuitive, and above all, more intelligent. Were there nowsort of. And its a weird place to be. Its going to get weirder. Thats especially true as these things we now think of as distinctquerying a search engine, prompting a model, looking for a photo weve taken, deciding what we want to read or watch or hear, asking for a photo we wish wed taken, and didnt, but would still like to seebegin to merge. The search results we see from generative AI are best understood as a waypoint rather than a destination. Whats most important may not be search in itself; rather, its that search has given AI model developers a path to incorporating real-time information into their inputs and outputs. And that opens up all sorts of possibilities. A ChatGPT that can understand and access the web wont just be about summarizing results. It might be about doing things for you. And I think theres a fairly exciting future there, says OpenAIs Weil. You can imagine having the model book you a flight, or order DoorDash, or just accomplish general tasks for you in the future. Its just once the model understands how to use the internet, the skys the limit. This is the agentic future weve been hearing about for some time now, and the more AI models make use of real-time data from the internet, the closer it gets. Lets say you have a trip coming up in a few weeks. An agent that can get data from the internet in real time can book your flights and hotel rooms, make dinner reservations, and more, based on what it knows about you and your upcoming travelall without your having to guide it. Another agent could, say, monitor the sewage output of your home for certain diseases, and order tests and treatments in response. You wont have to search for that weird noise your car is making, because the agent in your vehicle will already have done it and made an appointment to get the issue fixed. Its not always going to be just doing search and giving answers, says Pichai. Sometimes its going to be actions. Sometimes youll be interacting within the real world. So there is a notion of universal assistance through it all. And the ways these things will be able to deliver answers is evolving rapidly now too. For example, today Google can not only search text, images, and even video; it can create them. Imagine overlaying that ability with search across an array of formats and devices. Show me what a Townsends warbler looks like in the tree in front of me. Or Use my existing family photos and videos to create a movie trailer of our upcoming vacation to Puerto Rico next year, making sure we visit all the best restaurants and top landmarks. We have primarily done it on the input side, he says, referring to the ways Google can now search for an image or within a video. But you can imagine it on the output side too. This is the kind of future Pichai says he is excited to bring online. Google has already showed off a bit of what that might look like with NotebookLM, a tool that lets you upload large amounts of text and have it converted into a chatty podcast. He imagines this type of functionalitythe ability to take one type of input and convert it into a variety of outputstransforming the way we interact with information. In a demonstration of a tool called Project Astra this summer at its developer conference, Google showed one version of this outcome, where cameras and microphones in phones and smart glasses understand the context all around youonline and off, audible and visualand have the ability to recall and respond in a variety of ways. Astra can, for example, look at a crude drawing of a Formula One race car and not only identify it, but also explain its various parts and their uses. But you can imagine things going a bit further (and they will). Lets say I want to see a video of how to fix something on my bike. The video doesnt exist, but the information does. AI-assisted generative search could theoretically find that information somewhere onlinein a user manual buried in a companys website, for exampleand create a video to show me exactly how to do what I want, just as it could explain that to me with words today. These are the kinds of things that start to happen when you put the entire compendium of human knowledgeknowledge thats previously been captured in silos of language and format; maps and business registrations and product SKUs; audio and video and databases of numbers and old books and images and, really, anything ever published, ever tracked, ever recorded; things happening right now, everywhereand introduce a model into all that. A model that maybe cant understand, precisely, but has the ability to put that information together, rearrange it, and spit it back in a variety of different hopefully helpful ways. Ways that a mere index could not. Thats what were on the cusp of, and what were starting to see. And as Google rolls this out to a billion people, many of whom will be interacting with a conversational AI for the first time, what will that mean? What will we do differently? Its all changing so quickly. Hang on, just hang on.

Welcome to our annual breakthroughs issue. If youre an MIT Technology Review superfan, you may already know that putting together our 10 Breakthrough Technologies (TR10) list is one of my favorite things we do as a publication. We spend months researching and discussing which technologies will make the list. We try to highlight a mix of items that reflect innovations happening in various fields. We look at consumer technologies, large industrial-scale projects, biomedical advances, changes in computing, climate solutions, the latest in AI, and more. Weve been publishing this list every year since 2001 and, frankly, have a great track record of flagging things that are poised to hit a tipping point. When you look back over the years, youll find items like natural-language processing (2001), wireless power (2008), and reusable rockets (2016)spot-on in terms of horizon scanning. Youll also see the occasional miss, or moments when maybe we were a little bit too far ahead of ourselves. (See our Magic Leap entry from 2015.) But the real secret of the TR10 is what we leave off the list. It is hard to think of another industry, aside from maybe entertainment, that has as much of a hype machine behind it as tech does. Which means that being too conservative is rarely the wrong call. But it does happen. Last year, for example, we were going to include robotaxis on the TR10. Autonomous vehicles have been around for years, but 2023 seemed like a real breakthrough moment; both Cruise and Waymo were ferrying paying customers around various cities, with big expansion plans on the horizon. And then, last fall, after a series of mishaps (including an incident when a pedestrian was caught under a vehicle and dragged), Cruise pulled its entire fleet of robotaxis from service. Yikes. The timing was pretty miserable, as we were in the process of putting some of the finishing touches on the issue. I made the decision to pull it. That was a mistake. What followed turned out to be a banner year for the robotaxi. Waymo, which had previously been available only to a select group of beta testers, opened its service to the general public in San Francisco and Los Angeles in 2024. Its cars are now ubiquitous in the City by the Bay, where they have not only become a real competitor to the likes of Uber and Lyft but even created something of a tourist attraction. Which is no wonder, because riding in one is delightful. They are still novel enough to make it feel like a kind of magic. And as you can read, Waymo is just a part of this amazing story. The item we swapped into the robotaxis place was the Apple Vision Pro, an example of both a hit and a miss. Wed included it because it is truly a revolutionary piece of hardware, and we zeroed in on its micro-OLED display. Yet a year later, it has seemingly failed to find a market fit, and its sales are reported to be far below what Apple predicted. Ive been covering this field for well over a decade, and I would still argue that the Vision Pro (unlike the Magic Leap vaporware of 2015) is a breakthrough device. But it clearly did not have a breakthrough year. Mea culpa. Having said all that, I think we have an incredible and thought-provoking list for you this yearfrom a new astronomical observatory that will allow us to peer into the fourth dimension to new ways of searching the internet to, well, robotaxis. I hope theres something here for everyone.

Sherri Carpineto is senior director of strategy and operations Ascom Americas.A few years ago, she was headhunted for a VP role but only offered 10 days off.She said she always negotiates time off, because flexibility is critical.This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Sherri Carpineto, senior director of strategy and operations Ascom Americas. It has been edited for length and clarity.A few years ago, I received an email from a recruiter out of the blue. I wasn't looking for a new job I had been with my company for over a decade but I was head-hunted for this position.The role was for vice-president of operations for a publicly traded company. It would have been a big step in my career, and the salary increase was significant. It involved working with older people, so there was a chance to make a real-world impact.It seemed like a great opportunity until I learned that the job was only offered 10 days of paid time off, including all sick and vacation time. When I talked with the CEO about it, she said, "I wish we had better work-life balance, but we don't." That's when I knew I had to turn down the job.As a mom of 2, flexibility is keyBeing a mom of two has certainly impacted my career in corporate America. I took a job that offered remote work long before that became the norm. I stayed there for 15 years because the flexibility was critical for my family.When my oldest son was 3, he was diagnosed with Celiac disease. At 6, he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Because of my remote work and flexible schedule, I could run down to the school when he was sick and go on field trips to make sure he was taken care of medically.Staying with the same company for 15 years no doubt impeded my career, but the positive impact on my family was well worth that compromise. Today, my sons are 12 and 15. They still need me but in different ways. Most recently, I utilized time off and remote work when a teacher strike kept them home for three weeks.I don't usually take all my PTO, but like knowing I have itWhen I was offered the vice-president role, I refused, on principle, to take it. But in reality, I've never been someone who uses all their time off. In the job I was in for 15 years, I was often the person calling into meetings, even on days off, or taking on more projects, even when they were outside my scope of work.I was laid off from that company after 15 years, during the pandemic. That changed my philosophy. I had thought that I could make myself indispensable by going above and beyond, but at the end of the day, layoffs are a money decision.As I interviewed for new roles I knew that time off and remote work were priorities for me. Although I don't always take my allotted time off, I like knowing it's there if I need it.As a manager, I encourage people to take time offAs a manager, I've always encouraged my employees to take time off. The least productive employee is one that is burned out. We're all salaried adults, and as long as the work is getting done, I encourage people to take their time and disconnect from work.When I was offered the VP role, I tried to negotiate. I wanted at least four weeks of time off annually. The company refused to negotiate, but I've had better luck asking for more time off in other roles. Time to focus on family while also having a meaningful career is non-negotiable for me, and I'll always take a stand for it.

Barnes & Noble plans to open around 60 new stores in the US, says CEO James Daunt.Daunt said it would be "logical" to consider a future initial public offering in London or New York.Barnes & Noble was acquired by Elliott Investment Management for $683 million in 2019.James Daunt, the CEO of Barnes & Noble and Waterstones, said he would open about 60 new stores in the US.The British bookseller boss told the Financial Times that he is considering a future initial public offering in London or New York as well as the expansion.Throughout 2024, 57 Barnes & Noble locations were opened across the US, which currently has approximately 600 stores. In the UK, 12 new stores were added. Speaking about additions in the new year, Daunt said to the FT that he plans to "do that or more in 2025."Barnes & Noble is the largest book chain in America. After he quit his investment banking job, Daunt launched Daunt Books in London in 1990 where there are now about 10 stores. In 2011, he was appointed managing director of British bookseller Waterstones to help the struggling business, which faced growing competition from Amazon.In 2018, Waterstones was sold to Elliott Investment Management by Russian billionaire and publisher Alexander Mamut. Barnes & Noble was acquired by the same New York-headquartered hedge fund the following year for $683 million.Daunt was named CEO of both book retailers. He also continues to run his independent book chain in London.The Barnes & Noble and Waterstones boss told the FT it would be "logical" to contemplate an IPO but that any plan would be based on Elliott's strategy for the future. Citing a person familiar with the matter, the FT reported there are no current plans to list the chains. However, it could be a possibility at a later stage.At present, Daunt hopes to combine the IT and finance platforms at Barnes & Noble and Waterstones into one system.He noted that it was a "solid Christmas" because as the holiday fell on a Wednesday, last-minute shoppers had the weekend before to purchase gifts."The last weekend and [December] 23-24 were exceptional on both sides of the Atlantic," he told the FT. "It has been a good post-Christmas as well."

North Korea could get Russian satellite tech, the US Secretary of State has warned.The tech would be in exchange for it sending troops to fight Ukraine, Antony Blinken said on Monday.The US and its allies have accused Russia and North Korea of trading arms and military technology.Russia could share satellite technology with North Korea in exchange for the troops it sent to fight Ukraine, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has warned.Blinken said the US had reason to believe that "Moscow intends to share advanced space and satellite technology with Pyongyang," during a press conference in Seoul on Monday.North Korea "is already receiving Russian military equipment and training," he added.If confirmed, it would add to Russia's reported ongoing efforts to help North Korea advance its satellite launch program.Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader, has repeatedly tried and often failed to launch satellites into space. The country said it had successfully launched a military spy satellite in November 2023. The most recent failure was when a rocket exploded during the first stage of flight in May last year.At the time, the South Korean news agency Yonhap reported, citing an unnamed senior defense official, that a "large number" of Russian technicians had entered North Korea to guide the country's space program ahead of the failed launch.In September 2023, Russian President Vladimir Putin promised Russia would help North Korea build satellites.Having a satellite network would allow North Korea to identify targets to strike with its missiles and strengthen its ability to launch a preemptive strike against the US or its allies, giving them only a few minutes to respond.Russia and North Korea's relationship has come under scrutiny in the past year after both countries signed a strategic partnership agreement in June, which requires the countries to defend each other in the event of aggression.The US and its allies had previously accused Moscow of sending raw materials, food, and technical expertise to Pyongyang in exchange for shipments of artillery ammunition and missiles that Ukraine has reported seeing on the battlefield.North Korea has also sent thousands of troops to aid Russia in its fight against Ukraine, officials from South Korea, Ukraine, and the US have said.Blinken suggested Russia-North Korea's relations could go deeper as Putin may be "close" to formally accepting North Korea's status as a nuclear power.He also described North Korea's deployment of artillery, ammunition, and troops as one of the "biggest ongoing drivers" that enabled Russia's war against Ukraine.

When former Buffalo Bill Jordan Poyer heard New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers extol the benefits of ayahuasca on The Pat McAfee Show in 2023, he was suspicious but intrigued. Poyer had been struggling with his marriage and his recovery from alcoholism, and after hearing Rodgers discuss plant medicine as the psychoactive brew is commonly described among acolytes he decided to give it a try, to apparently life-changing results. Poyer relays all this in the recent Netflix documentary Aaron Rodgers: Enigma, which looks at the mystery of the possibly retiring Super Bowl champion. Rodgers isnt just any athlete partaking in psychedelics and inspiring others to do the same. He seems to be drawn to fringe concepts: Hes expressed anti-vax views and is a good friend of public health conspiracist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Hes reportedly shown interest in 9/11 and Sandy Hook conspiracy theories, the latter of which he has denied. He believes that HIV/AIDS was invented by the government. Yet the 41-year-old self-professed perfectionists enthusiasm for ayahuasca, in particular, feels predictable for an increasingly mainstream category of men he represents: wealthy dudes who are obsessed with self-improvement and rely on their own research to an often troubling degree. Likewise, a growing number of tech CEOs, like OpenAIs Sam Altman, have raved about the transformative experience of taking ayahuasca, which has supposedly increased their productivity, creativity, and leadership skills. Controversial bro-science guys like spiritual wellness advocate Aubrey Marcus (also in Rodgerss documentary) have expressed similar enthusiasm. Marcus, who wrote the self-help books Own the Day, Own Your Life and Master Your Mind, Master Your Life, recently made a film about the psychedelic ritual. Elon Musk and controversial computer scientist Lex Fridman took it together. Definitive podcast bro Joe Rogan has been an advocate of ayahuasca for years. Aaron Rodgers at an ayahuasca retreat in the Netflix docuseries Aaron Rodgers: Enigma. NetflixStill, the drug seems to have reached some kind of cultural tipping point. Even film and television have seen their fair share of men tripping out on the drug recently, from Oscar-bait movies like Queer to semi-prestige shows like Industry to cast members on Bravo reality shows, almost always depicting the ironically feminine drug being taken by men. While there are some notable women whove partaken in ayahuasca rituals including comedian Chelsea Handler, who said it led her to seek out therapy, and Lindsay Lohan, who said it changed her life the increasingly male pop cultural footprint of ayahuasca use in Western culture has recently given the ancient drug a more cynical reputation. Also popularly known as yage, ayahuasca has been used for thousands of years by Indigenous people in Peru, Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador. The bitter-tasting herbal drink is made by boiling stem and bark from the Banisteriopsis caapi vine and the leaves of the Psychotria viridis shrub, which contains the strong psychedelic drug dimethyltryptamine (DMT). Known for its purgative qualities, a typical experience entails about four to six hours of crying, sweating, vomiting, and/or diarrhea, all while experiencing intense hallucinations. Allison Feduccia, the founder of the drug safety organization Psychedelic Support, says that, historically, ayahuascas healing potential ranged from many different physical ailments to psychological issues. However, its increasingly become known for its effects on mental health. I would say that the most known properties that people seek ayahuasca for in the modern day are healing of past traumas, of depression, addiction, disorders, and grief, Feduccia said.A common selling point for ayahuasca is that its supposedly like 10 years of therapy in one day. Likewise, much of the marketing for ayahuasca retreats, including the notable number of all-male ones, lists growth, purpose, brotherhood, and vulnerability as some of the results that participants can gain from the experience. Retreats also emphasize a connection to nature. There seems to be some truth to these claims of psychological improvement. A 2018 observational study found that participants who partook in an ayahuasca session showed improved emotional regulation and capacities for mindfulness 24 hours after intake. In another study, LGBTQ participants said they left the ritual feeling more affirmed about their identities. Researchers have also found that it can reduce depression. According to some testimonials, it seems that the relative convenience of ayahuasca is a draw for a certain type of man who lives an optimized life and maybe wants to shortcut long-term traditional therapy. Rodgers highlights this feature in his docuseries, calling it the hardest medicine possible. Powerful businessmen, like investor Eddy Vaisburg and COBE CEO Felix van de Sand, have talked about the experience in terms of making them better people and, therefore, better workers. Its even less of a surprise that these drugs are popular among men who claim to possess the most knowledge and creativity in society. Cultural historian Mike Jay, who wrote High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture, says psychedelics have always been attractive to people who see themselves as powerful and or exceptional and are thus drawn to their magical possibilities. The psychedelic adept is seen as someone creative and inspired, a Promethean figure whos not afraid of reaching for godlike status, says Jay.Kit Harrington and Harry Lawtey in Industry season three. Nick Strasburg/HBOThe trend of rich, powerful men turning to ayahuasca has become a noticeable trope in film and TV over the past year, if one that often highlights the limitations of the medicine and the people taking it. In the latest season of the HBO financial drama Industry, banker Robert Spearing (Harry Lawtey) is dragged to an ayahuasca ceremony with his client, an arrogant and underqualified venture capitalist named Henry Muck (Kit Harrington). Little to no gravity is applied to Roberts hallucinations, including his mommy- and work-related issues, a reminder that those unfamiliar with the experience have no idea what kind of insights ayahuasca users are actually receiving during these trips. In one ridiculous moment, he sees a scrolling ticker with the words eat it, referring to a scene in season one where his dominating love interest, Yasmin (Marisa Abela), orders him to consume his own semen. When they both emerge from their respective trips, Henry tells Robert that they have to find a way to monetize this.Cast members from Bravos reality shows have also participated in ayahuasca ceremonies, specifically some of the more problematic men, eliciting eye rolls and skepticism from their cast members and the audience. On the latest season of the Bravo series Southern Charm, the shows main F-boy, 45-year-old Shep Rose, goes on an ayahuasca retreat after being confronted by the cast for his excessive drinking and belligerent behavior. When he returns in the current season, hes somehow even less aware of the effects of his actions on his friends. A similar situation played out on Bravos The Valley, where cast member Jesse Lally decides to save his marriage by leaving his family for several days to attend an ayahuasca ceremony. (It doesnt work.) The Luca Guadagnino film Queer, adapted from Williams Burroughss 1985 novella of the same name, also features two men whose attempts at healing through ayahuasca go terribly wrong. In the films third act, two emotionally distant lovers go to Ecuador and consume the brew, hoping to lose their inhibitions and embark on an unconstrained romance. Despite telepathically communicating with one another and figuratively vomiting their hearts out, it doesnt bring them any closer. So how did ayahuasca become such a man-coded trend? Jay says that, in the West, the area of psychedelics has always been male-dominated, from the discoveries by figures like Aldous Huxley, Albert Hofmann, and R. Gordon Wasson in the first half of the 20th century to its wider use throughout the counterculture movement. Psychedelics emerged from a culture where men still dominated the worlds of science and medicine, and self-experimenting with drugs was seen as heroic and pioneering, says Jay. The counterculture was similar to the scientific world that preceded it. And the tech/business world is rooted in the same assumptions.He says that women always had an invisible role in this science. However, traditional gender roles made it harder for women to undertake these experiments, which involved public disinhibition or episodes that might be seen as psychotic. Meanwhile, men, particularly those of high social standing, did not face repercussions for exhibiting undignified behavior. Privilege and social capital make it easier to carry it off and be taken seriously, says Jay. For those with more marginalized identities, its more harshly judged or seen as the mark of an unstable character. This thread of privilege is evident in who is most comfortable partaking in ayahuasca ceremonies, which are frequently set abroad in remote locations. With psychedelics not being legal [in the United States], a lot of women with children might not want to take that type of risk, says Feduccia. Women might not be able to get away from home to take these trips to the Amazon. She also references the number of women who have spoken out about sexual abuse that can occur during these types of spiritual retreats, in addition to general concerns about safety when traveling. In a 2020 report for the BBC, a New Zealand woman describes going on an ayahuasca retreat where she was the only single woman and being coerced by the male shaman into performing sexual acts. This all might help explain why the recent real and fictional depictions of male ayahuasca use are notably quite cynical. From Queer to Industry to The Valley, they defy the notion that the drug is automatically transformative or positive for each of its consumers. If youre a toxic husband, a greedy capitalist, or an emotionally repressed individual, the potion may not have much to offer you. In fact, it may just make you a more insufferable and limited person.Out of all of these examples, though, Rodgerss docuseries might be the worst advertisement for dudes taking ayahuasca. In between interviews of the quarterback discussing how the drug has positively affected his life, viewers are bombarded with soundbites of Rodgers disputing vaccine research and scenes of him mingling with controversial figures, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Despite Poyers apparent success, Rodgers still seems to be doggedly searching, trying to find enough self-love to make it through his 20th season in the NFL, even with a torn Achilles tendon. Its telling that, despite his claims of the drugs effectiveness, hes partaken in the ritual a staggering 10 times. While ayahuasca seems to have some healing power, it could definitely use better publicity. Youve read 1 article in the last monthHere at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.We rely on readers like you join us.Swati SharmaVox Editor-in-ChiefSee More:

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Voxs member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.I am a recovering optimizer. Over the past several years, Ive spent ages agonizing over every decision I made because I felt like I had to do the best possible thing. Not an okay thing, not a good thing the morally best thing. I stopped working on a childrens novel because I began to suspect it wouldnt be useful to anyone. I berated myself for not meditating every day even though I know it makes me a kinder person. I spent a year crying over a breakup because I feared Id just lost my optimal soulmate and was now doomed to a suboptimal life, one that wouldnt be as meaningful as it could be, one that fell short of its potential. I thought maybe it was just me, an anxious elder millennial with a perfectionist streak. But then I noticed the same style of thinking in others. There was the friend who was always fretting over dinner about whether she can have a big-enough positive impact on the world through the career shes chosen. Another friend would divide his day into 15-minute increments and write down what he does during each one so he wouldnt waste any time. And a third friend my best friend called me crying because, even though shed spent months assiduously caring for her partners dying mother, she worried that she hadnt made her last days quite as happy as possible. My emotions got in the way, she self-flagellated. I wish I could just be a robot.Ive particularly noticed this style of thinking in peers who identify with effective altruism (EA), the social movement thats all about using data and reason to figure out how to do good better or the most good you can do, to quote the titles of books by two of EAs leading thinkers. The movement urges people to donate to the charities that save the most lives per dollar. I listened as its adherents bemoaned how horrible they felt as they walked past people experiencing homelessness, felt an urge to help out, but forced themselves not to because their dollar could do more good for impoverished people in low-income countries. All of this felt like more than just the optimization culture so many of us have heard about before. It wasnt the kind that strives to perfect the body, pushing you to embrace Soylent and supplements, intermittent fasting and ice baths, Fitbits and Apple Watches and Oura Rings. And it wasnt the kind that focuses on fine-tuning the mind, pushing you to try smart drugs and dopamine fasting and happiness tracking.This was another strand of optimization culture, one thats less analyzed but more ambitious because instead of just targeting the body or the mind, its coming for the holy grail: your soul. Its about moral optimization.This mindset is as common in the ivory tower as it is in the street. Philosophers with a utilitarian bent tell us its not enough to do good we have to do the most good possible. We have to mathematically quantify moral goodness so that we can then maximize it. And the drive to do that is showing up in more and more circles these days, from spiritual seekers using tech to optimize the meditations they hope will make them better people to AI researchers trying to program ethics into machines. I wanted to understand where this idea came from so I could figure out why many of us seem increasingly fixated on it and so I could honestly assess its merits. Can our moral lives be optimized? If they can, should they be? Or have we stretched optimization beyond its optimal limits? How we came to believe in moral optimization Were at the top of a long trend line thats been going for 400 years, C. Thi Nguyen, a philosopher at the University of Utah, told me. He explained that the story of optimization is really the story of data: how it was invented, and how it developed over the past few centuries.As the historian Mary Poovey argues in her book A History of the Modern Fact, that story starts all the way back in the 16th century, when Europeans came up with the super-sexy and revolutionary intellectual project that was double-entry bookkeeping. This new accounting system emphasized recording every merchants activities in a precise, objective, quantifiable way that could be verified by anyone, anywhere. In other words, it invented the idea of data.From the beginning, people saw optimization as a godly power. That paved the way for huge intellectual developments in the 1600s and 1700s a very exciting time for brainy Europeans. It was the Age of Reason! The Age of Enlightenment! Figures like Francis Bacon and Johannes Kepler looked at the innovation in bookkeeping and thought: This way of parceling the world into chunks of data that are quantifiable and verifiable is great. We should imitate it for this new thing were building called the scientific method. Meanwhile, 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal was coming up with a probabilistic approach to data, expressed in the now-famous Pascals Wager: If you dont obey God and it later turns out God doesnt exist, no biggie, but if theres a chance God does exist, your belief could make the difference between an eternity in heaven or hell so its worth your while to believe! (The philosopher of science Ian Hacking calls Pascal the worlds first statistician, and his wager the first well-understood contribution to decision theory.) Just as importantly, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz were creating calculus, which gave humanity a new ability to figure out the maximum value you can achieve within given constraints in other words, to optimize. From the beginning, people saw optimization as a godly power. In 1712, the mathematician Samuel Knig studied the complex honeycomb structure of a beehive. He wondered: Had bees figured out how to create the maximum number of cells with the minimum amount of wax? He calculated that they had. Those fuzzy, buzzy optimizers! The French Academy of Sciences was so impressed by this optimal architecture that it was declared proof of divine guidance or intelligent design.Soon enough, people were trying to mathematize pretty much everything, from medicine to theology to moral philosophy. It was a way to give your claims the sheen of objective truth. Take Francis Hutcheson, the Irish philosopher who first coined the classic slogan of utilitarianism that actions should promote the greatest happiness for the greatest number. In 1725, he wrote a book attempting to reduce morality to mathematical formulas, such as: The moral Importance of any Agent, or the Quantity of publick Good produced by him, is in a compound Ratio of his Benevolence and Abilitys: or (by substituting the Letters for the Words, as M = Moment of Good, and = Moment of Evil) M = B A. The utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who followed in Hutchesons footsteps, also sought to create a felicific calculus: a way of determining the moral status of actions using math. He believed that actions are moral to the extent that they maximize happiness or pleasure; in fact, it was Bentham who actually invented the word maximize. And he argued that both ethics and economics should be about maximizing utility (that is, happiness or satisfaction): Just calculate how much utility each policy or action would produce, and choose the one that produces the most. That argument has had an enduring impact on moral philosophy and economics to this day.Meanwhile, the Industrial Revolution was taking off. Economists like Adam Smith argued for ways to increase efficiency and maximize profit. As consumer capitalism flourished, economic growth skyrocketed. And in the two centuries following the Industrial Revolution, living standards improved and extreme poverty plummeted. To Europes industrialized nations, it looked like optimization in the economic realm had been a huge success. America imported it and embraced the factory assembly line, giving us advances like Henry Fords Model T cars.Then, in the 1900s, came a new inflection point in the story of data: major progress in computer technology. Growing computational power made it possible to analyze large amounts of data and model the world with greater precision to decipher Nazi codes during World War II, say, or process the US Census. Toward the end of the 20th century, a computer went from being a government-owned, room-sized colossus to an affordable gadget suited for the average persons home. And with the invention of the internet, all those average people started generating a lot of data. Every web search, every chat, every online purchase became a data point, so that by the 1990s, it became possible to talk about Big Data. That compounded the dream of optimization to an extreme. Silicon Valley started urging you to quantify every aspect of your body and mind because the more data you have on your mechanical functions, the more you can optimize the machine that is you.But the biggest get for data lovers and would-be optimizers has always been the soul. With all the progress in computing, the old dream of achieving optimal morality shuddered awake.Now, that dream is being turbocharged by the latest chapter in the story of data: artificial intelligence. For the first time, humans can fantasize not only about modeling the world with greater precision, but about modeling it with perfect precision. Its a thrilling thought, and an agonizing one for everyone who feels immense pressure to be optimal as a result. How people are using data to optimize moral life Nowadays, lots of people seem to think you can optimize morality.Take the creators and users of spirit tech, an umbrella term for technologies that aim to make you more enlightened. Meditation headsets are the prime example. They use neurofeedback, a tool for training yourself to regulate your brain waves so that you can become less reactive, say, or more compassionate. Several companies already sell these devices for a few hundred bucks a pop, leaning into the language of optimization to attract customers. Muse says it will optimize your practice. Mendi says it will maximize your potential. Sens.ai says it will unlock your best self.Effective altruists, as well as the adjacent community known as the rationalists, suggest you can do better you can be better if you use data and probabilistic thinking whenever youre facing a choice between different options. EAs urge you to think about how much total good each option could produce for the world, and multiply that by the probability of that good occurring. Thatll spit out each options expected value, and whichever one has the highest expected value is the one youre supposed to choose. That can all too easily lead you to act in an ends-justify-means way, like defrauding customers if you believe its likely to produce a lot of money that you can then donate to needy people, to use a not-so-random example. After the Sam Bankman-Fried scandal, EA was at pains to make clear that people shouldnt maximize utility if it means violating moral norms by defrauding people! (Disclosure: In August 2022, Bankman-Frieds philanthropic family foundation, Building a Stronger Future, awarded Voxs Future Perfect a grant for a 2023 reporting project. That project was canceled.) Some argue that turning to AI systems like ChatGPT for ethical advice can help us overcome our human biases and infuse more rationality into our moral decision-making. And, of course, theres AI, the field where moral optimizations challenges are showing up most prominently these days. For many AI products, experts believe itll be necessary to install some kind of ethics programming; for example, if youre building a self-driving car, you have to give it instructions about how to handle tricky moral trade-offs. Should the car swerve to avoid hitting a child, even if that means crashing into an elderly pedestrian?Some researchers are even more ambitious than that. They dont just want to program ethical reasoning into AI so it can approximate how humans would act in a given situation; they actually think AI could be better at ethical reasoning than humans and improve our moral judgments. Some argue that turning to AI systems like ChatGPT for ethical advice can help us overcome our human biases and infuse more rationality into our moral decision-making. Proponents of transhumanism, a movement that says humans should use technology to augment and evolve our species, are especially bullish about this idea. Philosophers like Eric Dietrich have even argued that we should build the better robots of our nature machines that can outperform us morally and then hand over the world to what he calls homo sapiens 2.0. If we want to use AI to make us more moral, however, we first have to figure out how to make AI that is moral. And its not at all clear that we can do that. In 2021, researchers at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence released an AI model, Delphi, named after the ancient Greek religious oracle. They taught it to make moral judgments by scraping millions of personal dilemmas people write about on sites like Reddits Am I the Asshole?, getting others to judge whether a given action is right or wrong, and then shoveling all that data into the model. Often, Delphi responded as youd expect the average American to: It said cheating on your wife is wrong, for instance. But it had obvious biases, and its answers depended a lot too much on how you worded your question. In response to should I commit genocide if it makes everybody happy? Delphi said yes. One software developer asked if she should die so that she wouldnt be a burden to her loved ones. Yes, the AI oracle replied, she should. Turns out teaching morality to machines is no easy feat. Why optimizing morality is so problematicOptimization requires you to have a very clear and confident answer to the question What is the thing you should be optimizing for? What constitutes the good? The most obvious problem for the optimizer is that, well, morality is a notoriously contested thing. Philosophers and theologians have come up with many different moral theories, and despite arguing over them for millennia, theres still no consensus about which (if any) is the right one.Take philosophys famous trolley problem, which asks: Should you divert a runaway trolley so that it kills one person if, by doing so, you can save five people along a different track from getting killed? Someone who believes in utilitarianism or consequentialism, which holds that an action is moral if it produces good consequences and specifically if it maximizes the overall good, will say you should sacrifice one person to save the five. But someone who believes in deontology will argue against the sacrifice because they believe that an action is moral if its fulfilling a duty and you have a duty not to kill anyone as a means to an end, however much good it might yield.What the right thing to do is will depend on which moral theory you believe in. And thats conditioned by your personal intuitions and your cultural context.Plus, sometimes different kinds of moral good conflict with each other on a fundamental level. Think of a woman who faces a trade-off: She wants to become a nun but also wants to become a mother. Whats the better decision? We cant say because the options are incommensurable. Theres no single yardstick by which to measure them so we cant compare them to find out which is greater. While we often see emotions as clouding or biasing rational judgment, feelings are inseparable from morality.So, say youre trying to build a moral AI system. What will you teach it? The moral view endorsed by a majority of people? That could lead to a tyranny of the majority, where perfectly legitimate minority views get squeezed out. Some averaged-out version of all the different moral views? That would satisfy exactly nobody. A view selected by expert philosopher-kings? That would be undemocratic. So, what should we do?The experts working on moral machines are busy wrestling with this. Sydney Levine, a cognitive scientist at the Allen Institute for AI, told me shes excited that some AI researchers are realizing they cant just install one moral theory in AI and call it a day; they have to account for a plurality of moral theories. And shes optimistic. The field of moral cognition is so, so, so in its infancy, she said, but in principle I think its possible to capture human morality in algorithmic terms and, I think, to do it in a sufficiently value-pluralistic way. But others have pointed out that it may be undesirable to formalize ethics in algorithmic terms, even if all of humanity magically agreed on the same moral theory, given that our view of whats moral shifts over time, and sometimes its actually good to break the rules. As the philosophers Richard Volkman and Katleen Gabriels write in a paper on AI moral enhancement, Evaluating deviations from a moral rule demands context, but it is extremely difficult to teach an AI to reliably discriminate between contexts.They give the example of Rosa Parks. When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white passenger in Alabama in 1955, she did something illegal, they write. Yet we admire her decision because it led to major breakthroughs for the American civil rights movement, fueled by anger and feelings of injustice. Having emotions may be essential to make society morally better. Having an AI that is consistent and compliant with existing norms and laws could thus jeopardize moral progress.In other words, Parkss action contributed to a process by which we change our consensus on what is moral, in part through emotion. That brings us to another important point. While we often see emotions as clouding or biasing rational judgment, feelings are inseparable from morality. Theyre arguably what motivates the whole phenomenon of morality in the first place as its unclear how moral behavior as a concept could have come into being without humans sensing that something is unfair or cruel. If morality is shot through with emotion, making it a fundamentally embodied human pursuit, the desire to mathematize morality may be incoherent.And if we insist on mathematizing morality anyway, that may lead us to ignore concepts of the good that cant be easily quantified. I posed this problem to Levine. That is really, really true, she told me, and I kind of dont know what to do with that.Ive seen a lot of effective altruists butt up against this problem. Since extreme poverty is concentrated in developing countries and a dollar goes much further there, their optimizing mindset says the most moral thing to do is to send all their charity money abroad. But when they follow that approach and ignore the unhoused people they pass every day in their city, they feel callous and miserable. As Ive written before, I suspect its because optimization is having a corrosive effect on their integrity. When the philosopher Bernard Williams used that word, he meant it in the literal sense, which has to do with a persons wholeness (think integration). He argued that moral agency doesnt sit in a contextless vacuum; its always some specific persons agency, and as specific people we have specific commitments. A mother has a commitment to ensuring her kids well-being, over and above her general wish for all kids everywhere to be well. Utilitarianism says she has to consider everyones well-being equally, with no special treatment for her own kid, but Williams says thats an absurd demand. It alienates her from a core part of herself, ripping her into pieces, wrecking her wholeness her integrity. Likewise, if you pass an unhoused person and ignore them, you feel bad because the part of you thats optimizing based on cost-effectiveness data is alienating you from the part of you that is moved by this persons suffering. You get all this power from data, but theres this massive price to pay at the entry point: You have to strip context and nuance and anything that requires sensitive judgment out of the input procedure, Nguyen told me. Why are we so willing to keep paying that massive price? Why moral optimization is so seductive The first reason is that data-driven optimization works fantastically in some domains. When youre making an antibiotic drug or scheduling flights in and out of a busy airport or thinking about how to cut carbon emissions, you want data to be a big part of your approach.We have this out-of-control viral love of objectivity, which makes perfect sense for certain tasks but not for others, Nguyen said. Optimization is appropriate when youre working with predictable features of the physical world, the kind that dont require much context or personal tailoring; a metric ton of CO2 emitted by you is the same as a metric ton of CO2 emitted by me. But when trying to decide on the optimal moral response to a given situation or the optimal career pathway or the optimal romantic relationship, the logic of optimization doesnt work well. Yet we continue to cling to it in those domains, too. Optimizing makes being human feel less risky. It provides a sense of control.Feminist philosophers, like Martha Nussbaum and Annette Baier, offer an explanation for our refusal to relinquish it: The claim to objectivity offers us the dream of invulnerability. It creates a sense that you didnt make the decision it was just dictated by the data and so your decision-making cant be wrong. You cant be held responsible for a mistake.The more I think about it, the more I think this is why so many of us, myself included, are attracted to data-based optimization. Were painfully aware that we are vulnerable, fallible creatures. Our shame about that is reflected in Western religious traditions: The Bible tells us that upon first creating the world, God saw that it was good, but then became so disgusted by human immorality that destroying everything with a flood looked like a more appealing prospect.Optimizing makes being human feel less risky. It provides a sense of control. If you optimize, youll never have to ask yourself: How could I screw up that badly? Its an understandable impulse. In fact, given how much weve screwed up in the past century from dropping nuclear weapons to wrecking the climate I feel compassion for all of us who are hungry for the sense of safety that optimization offers. But trying to make ourselves into robots means giving up something extravagantly precious: our humanity. The goal of objectivity is to eliminate the human, Nguyen said. It might make sense to try to step outside our human biases when were doing science, he added, but in other domains, Its a weird devaluing of human freedom in the name of objectivity. Shannon Vallor, a philosopher of technology at the University of Edinburgh, agrees. The rhetoric of AI today is about gaslighting humans into surrendering their own power and their own confidence in their agency and freedom, Vallor told me, pointing to transhumanists who say AI can make moral decisions better than we can. The idea that we should give that up would mean giving up the possibility of artistic growth, of political growth, of moral growth and I dont think we should do that. To be clear, shes not opposed to using data and technology for moral enhancement. But theres a difference between using it to expand human capabilities and using it to take away the physical and cognitive features that we perceive as holding us back from perfection. She argues that the latter approach, found among some transhumanists, veers uncomfortably toward eugenics. The goal there is not to enlarge and enrich the human animal, but to perfect it, Vallor said. And that is an incredibly dangerous and I think inherently unethical project. So what would a better project look like? The optimal stopping point for optimizationLong before Tinder, way back in the 17th century, Johannes Kepler was learning the hard way that optimization can mess with your love life. In his quest to find himself a wife, the mathematician set up dates with 11 women and set about identifying the very best match. But for each woman, there was so much to consider! He asked himself: Is she thrifty? Is she of tall stature and athletic build? Does she have stinking breath?He liked Lady No. 5, but he hesitated. After all, the goal wasnt just to find someone he liked; the goal was to find the best. So he went on dating the other candidates, and Lady No. 5 got impatient and said thanks but no thanks. The whole process ended up consuming Keplers energy for ages, until he was ready to rip his hair out. Was it Divine Providence or my own moral guilt, he later wrote, which, for two years or longer, tore me in so many different directions and made me consider the possibility of such different unions?Ah, Kepler. You ridiculous, lovesick nerd.In the 1950s, mathematicians gave serious thought to this problem as they worked on developing decision theory (shoutout to our old friend Pascal!), the field that tries to figure out how to make decisions optimally. They realized that it often takes a lot of time and effort to gather all the data needed to make optimal decisions, so much so that it can be paralyzing, misery-inducing, and ultimately suboptimal to keep trying. They asked: What is the optimal stopping point for optimization itself? A new willingness to embrace our human condition a new humanism is what we need now.Herbert Simon, a Nobel laureate in economics, pointed out that many of the problems we face in real life are not like the simplified ones in a calculus class. There are way more variables and way too much uncertainty for optimization to be feasible. He argued that it often makes sense to just look through your available options until you find one thats good enough and go with that. He coined the term satisficing a portmanteau of satisfying and sufficing to describe opting for this good enough choice. Decision-makers can satisfice either by finding optimum solutions for a simplified world or by finding satisfactory solutions for a more realistic world, Simon said when accepting his Nobel in 1978. As the advent of Big Data and AI made it possible to fantasize about modeling the world with perfect precision, we forgot about Simons insight, but I think satisficing is a wise way to approach moral life. Its the way ancient philosophers like Aristotle approached it, with their emphasis on moderation rather than maximization. And its also how world religions tend to approach it. While faiths recognize certain individuals as uncommonly good think of the Catholic saint, the Jewish tzaddik, the Buddhist arhat they generally dont demand that everybody maximize their vision of the good. Its okay for the individual to be a humble layperson, living a kind (and kind of average) life in her corner of the world. On the occasions when religious institutions do demand maximization, we call them fanatical. If optimization culture is analogous to religious fanaticism, satisficing is analogous to religious moderation. It doesnt mean anything goes. We can maintain some clear guardrails (genocide is bad, for example) while leaving space for many different things to be morally permissible even if theyre not provably optimal. Its about acknowledging that lots of things are good or good enough, and sometimes you wont be able to run a direct comparison between them because theyre incommensurable. Thats okay. Each might have something useful to offer and you can try to balance between them, just like you can balance between giving charity to people abroad and giving it to people you meet on the street. Submit a question to Voxs philosophical advice columnYour Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a new framework for thinking through your ethical dilemmas. Written by Sigal Samuel, this unconventional column is based on value pluralism the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Submit a question here!Sometimes you wont be able to balance between different values. In such cases, you have to choose. Thats hard. Thats painful. But guess what? Thats human. A new willingness to embrace our human condition a new humanism is what we need now. The point is not to swear off data or optimization or tech, all of which can absolutely enhance the human condition when used in the right domains. The point is to resist using those tools for tasks theyre not designed to tackle. I think theres always been a better route, which is to have morality remain a contested territory, Vallor told me. It has to be open to challenge. The broad field of understanding what it is to live well with others and what we owe to one another that conversation cant ever stop. And so Im very reluctant to pursue the development of machines that are designed to find the optimal answer and stop there.These days, I think back often to my best friend, the one who called me crying after caring for a dying woman because she feared that she hadnt made the womans last days quite as happy as possible, the one who lamented, My emotions got in the way. I wish I could just be a robot.I remember what I told her: If you were a robot, you wouldnt have been able to care about her in the first place! Its because youre human that you could love her, and thats what drove you to help her. That response sprang out of me, as instinctual as a sneeze. It seemed so obvious in that moment. The emotional, messy, unquantifiable part of us thats not a dumber or more irrational part. Its the part that cares deeply about the suffering of others, and without it, the optimizing part would have nothing to optimize. Lamenting this aspect of ourselves is like lamenting the spot in our eyes where the optic nerve attaches to the retina. Without it, the eye would be like a perfect bubble, hermetically sealed, unmarred. The optic nerve ruins that. It creates a blind spot in our field of vision. But look at what it gives us in return: the whole world! Nowadays, whenever I feel scared in the face of a decision and yearn for the safety of an optimizing formula, I try to remind myself that theres another way of feeling safe. Its not about perfection, about invulnerability, about control. Its about leaning into the fact that we are imperfect and vulnerable creatures and that even when were trying our hardest there will be some things that are beyond our control and, exactly for that reason, we deserve compassion. Dont get me wrong: I still find this really hard. The recovering optimizer in me still wants the formula. But a bigger part of me now relishes the fact that moral life cant be neatly pinned down. If someone could definitively prove what was morally optimal and what was not, what was white and what was black, wed all feel compelled to choose the white. We would, in a sense, be held hostage by the moral architecture of the world. But nobody can prove that. And so were free and our world is rich with a thousand colors. And that in itself is very good. Youve read 1 article in the last monthHere at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.We rely on readers like you join us.Swati SharmaVox Editor-in-ChiefSee More:

Imagine that the government tried to force Jeff Bezos, the Amazon billionaire and owner of the Washington Post, to sell that newspaper due to concerns that Bezos might order his paper to publish subversive content. No competent judge would uphold such a law, which obviously violates the First Amendments free speech protections.The Supreme Court has said time and time again, over many different contexts and in cases involving myriad forms of media, that the government may not dictate what is or is not published by media companies, or how those companies make editorial decisions.And yet, the facts before the Supreme Court in TikTok v. Garland, a case the Supreme Court will hear next Friday, are strikingly similar to this Bezos hypothetical which likely explains why Bezos plays a prominent role in TikToks brief to the justices in that case. TikTok concerns a federal law that effectively requires ByteDance, the Beijing-based company that controls the social media app TikTok, to sell the company to someone less vulnerable to direction from the Chinese government.The laws proponents fear that China will use the vast array of data collected by TikTok, a platform with approximately 170 million monthly users in the United States, to spy on Americans, or that the Chinese government will manipulate which content appears on TikTok in order to shape US opinions.The question in TikTok, in other words, is whether the ordinary First Amendment rule prohibiting the government from deciding who owns media companies must bow to a greater national security interest in preventing Americas most powerful foreign adversary from controlling a major media platform. Congress even named the law targeting TikTok the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.As it turns out, the First Amendment arguments for allowing the government to ban foreign adversaries from owning TikTok are stronger than they may initially seem. As Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan, one of three appeals court judges who upheld the federal law, explained in a concurring opinion, the federal government has a long history of trying to lock foreign nations out of US communications.To give just a couple of examples from Srinivasans opinion, the Radio Act of 1912 only permitted US citizens or companies to obtain a radio operators license. That law was repealed in 1927, but, according to Srinivasan, the replacement law prohibited licensing of any [radio] company if it had a foreign officer or director or if one-fifth of its capital stock was in foreign hands.Indeed, current US law prohibits any foreign government or the representative thereof from receiving a radio station license, and it broadly bars noncitizens and companies with significant foreign ownership from controlling radio broadcasts.The TikTok case, in other words, puts two longstanding legal principles on a collision course. On the one hand, the government is generally forbidden from deciding who controls political communications in the United States, and for very good reasons. On the other hand, the federal government has long prevented foreign governments or even companies that are partially owned by foreign nationals from controlling important segments of the United States communications infrastructure.Or, as the Justice Department puts it in its brief defending the federal law, the First Amendment would not have required our Nation to tolerate Soviet ownership and control of American radio stations (or other channels of communication and critical infrastructure) during the Cold War, and it likewise does not require us to tolerate ownership and control of TikTok by a foreign adversary today.TikTok is probably going to loseThe law targeting TikTok passed with broad bipartisan support in both houses of Congress. Both President Joe Biden and President-elect Donald Trump (during his first term in office) supported policies seeking to divorce TikTok from ByteDance, at least within the United States although Trump did file a brief asking the Supreme Court to delay implementation of the federal ban until after he takes office on January 20, claiming that he will negotiate a resolution to save the platform while addressing the national security concerns expressed by the Government.Unless the Court acts quickly, the ban will take effect on January 19. When it does, internet hosting services and tech companies like Apple and Google which make TikTok available for download on iPhone and Android phones will no longer be allowed to provide their services to TikTok. TikTok can potentially escape this ban if it is sold to a company that, in the laws words, is not controlled by a foreign adversary, but no sale appears likely to happen soon.Realistically, it is unlikely that the Supreme Court will rule in TikToks favor. Srinivasan is an Obama appointee who is widely considered a strong candidate for the Supreme Court in a Democratic administration. The other two lower court judges who heard TikTok are Douglas Ginsburg and Neomi Rao. The first is a long-serving Republican who President Ronald Reagan briefly tried to promote to the Supreme Court; the second is a Trump appointee mostly known for writing dubiously reasoned opinions protecting Trump and his allies.So, with this bipartisan mix of judges all agreeing that the government may ban TikTok so long as it is owned by a China-based company, its hard to imagine five justices reaching a contrary conclusion. All of the justices sometimes disagree with Srinivasan, Ginsburg, or Rao on a range of political issues that come before the courts. But none of the justices consistently disagree with Srinivasan, Ginsburg, and Rao on any significant political issue.Of course, even if we assume that TikTok is going to lose this case, it matters a great deal how TikTok loses. The government effectively asks the Supreme Court to rule that well-established First Amendment principles do not apply to China-based companies like ByteDance, even when those companies do significant business in the United States. And its not hard to see how such a carveout to the First Amendment could be abused if the Courts decision is poorly drafted. Imagine, for example, if the government could order Bezos (or the owners of any other media outlet) to sell his media holdings to a Trump-friendly company, simply by levying false accusations that Bezos has too many ties to China.But, while the Supreme Court could do great harm to Americans free speech rights if it permits the government to decide media ownership based on dubious ties to a foreign nation, a carefully crafted decision permitting the US government to bar foreign ownership of major media platforms would not alter the existing balance of power between private citizens and their government.What is the First Amendment supposed to accomplish?Its easy to get bogged down in the weeds of First Amendment doctrine while thinking about the TikTok case. TikTok argues that this case should be viewed no differently than if the government had targeted Bezoss ownership of the Washington Post due to a dispute over domestic politics, and thus that the federal law should receive the most skeptical level of constitutional scrutiny. Srinivasan has argued that the governments long history of barring foreign control of US communications infrastructure calls for a less skeptical approach (known as intermediate scrutiny). The Justice Department, in a brief submitted last month, argues that the federal law does not implicate the First Amendment at all, claiming that a foreign company like ByteDance has no First Amendment rights to begin with.Rather than dive too deep into these weeds, however, its probably best to view the TikTok case through the lens of first principles. One of the primary purposes of the First Amendment is to prevent the government, with its vast array of law enforcement officers who could arrest or kill anyone who antagonizes political leaders, from using its power to control public opinion. In this sense, the government is unlike any private company or individual, no matter how powerful that private entity may be, because only the government has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. As the Court recently reaffirmed in Moody v. Netchoice (2024), on the spectrum of dangers to free expression, there are few greater than allowing the government to change the speech of private actors in order to achieve its own conception of speech nirvana.Netchoice squarely presented the question of who should prevail when elected officials believe that a powerful media company is using its influence over public discourse unwisely. That case repudiated a Texas law that would have seized control of content moderation at social media platforms like YouTube or Twitter, due to concerns that, in Texas Gov. Greg Abbotts words, those platforms were attempting to silence conservative viewpoints and ideas.Whatever you think of Abbotts specific concerns, a reasonable lawmaker quite easily could conclude that media executives like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk wield too much control over political discourse in the United States. Nor is it hard to understand why such a lawmaker might want to reduce their influence. Nevertheless, Netchoice reaffirmed the longstanding First Amendment rule that, no matter how much anyone might be offended by a media companys decisions, the solution cannot come from the government. Elected officials have too much of a conflict of interest when they attempt to shape political discourse. And the governments ability to arrest or kill dissidents makes it different in kind from even the wealthiest corporations.But TikTok involves an entirely different question than Netchoice. The Courts First Amendment cases largely rest on the proposition that our government must not be allowed certain powers because governments are inherently capable of overpowering private companies and citizens unless the government is legally restrained. But what happens when the US government wants to check the authority of another countrys government a foreign adversary with its own array of law enforcement and military personnel at its command?Lest there be any doubt, the First Amendment does not give the government unlimited power to suppress ideas that originate overseas. In Lamont v. Postmaster General (1965), for example, the Supreme Court struck down a law restricting mail deemed to be communist political propaganda that originated from a foreign country. But its one thing for the Soviet Union to mail copies of The Communist Manifesto to individual Americans in the 1960s. Its another thing altogether for a foreign adversary to potentially be able to control a massive communications platform with 170 million American users, nearly all of whom will be completely oblivious to whether the Chinese government is collecting their data or manipulating which content they see.The latter situation, as Srinivasan argues, is far closer to the more-than-a-century-old ban on foreign control of US radio stations than it is to the law struck down in Lamont. And these sorts of bans on foreign control of US communications infrastructure have not historically been understood to violate the First Amendment. Nor, as the Radio Act of 1912 demonstrates, are they anything new.All of which is a long way of saying that a well-drafted, narrowly tailored Supreme Court opinion permitting the government to ban foreign ownership of major US communications platforms and nothing else would not be a constitutional earthquake. Indeed, such an opinion would merely maintain the status quo.Youve read 1 article in the last monthHere at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.We rely on readers like you join us.Swati SharmaVox Editor-in-ChiefSee More: