Adam Clark Estes

Nothing has made me appreciate the sheer scale and power of targeted advertising like having children. Months before the births of both my kids, it felt like every ad I encountered wanted to sell m...

Some smart people think we’re witnessing another ChatGPT moment. This time, folks aren’t flipping out over an iPhone app that can write pretty good poems, though. They’re watching thousands of AI a...

There’s something sad about seeing a humanoid robot lying on the floor. Without any electricity, these bipedal machines can’t stand up, so if they’re powered down and not hanging from a winch, they...

If you opened TikTok recently, you probably saw some weird stuff happening. Maybe you couldn’t post a new video. Maybe the app asked for your precise location. Maybe you weren’t seeing as much stuf...

The robots in my building are multiplying. It started with one roughly the size of a doghouse that cleans the floors, and not very well — a commercial-grade Roomba that talks to you if you get in i...

The paper clip problem always seemed too absurd to me. Also known as the paper clip maximizer, this is the thought experiment by philosopher Nick Bostrom that imagines how a superintelligent AI wit...

The weirdest thing happened to me recently. I contacted a customer service department and enjoyed it. I sent an email, heard back promptly, and got a refund. What was most notable about the positiv...

The most embarrassing thing happened to me recently. It was twilight, and I was walking my dog around the quiet Brooklyn neighborhood where I’ve been living for about a year. Then I heard a sound t...

The most recent jobs numbers paint a pretty grim picture of the labor market and the apparent havoc AI is wreaking on it. After warnings about unemployment among recent grads earlier this year, the...