Urgent.News

What's breaking now, across thousands of outlets.

Tech

Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy

Abstract editorial illustration

In her forthcoming book "The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State," historian Jill Lepore argues that private corporations in Silicon Valley are increasingly replacing the functions of democratic government, leading to a return to tyranny and mystification. This artificial state, she claims, is ushered in by the rule of algorithms, corporations, and machines.

While Lepore is not anti-technologist, she contends that certain tech leaders, particularly Elon Musk, are misreading science fiction and comic book tropes, which ultimately contradict their professed political beliefs.

Written by urgent.news from Hacker News's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.

Also reported by 1 other outlet

Read the original at techcrunch.com →

More in Tech

When is it safe to open the microphone? Building a realtime voice agent on Twilio

Wiring up a phone agent looks like a weekend project. Twilio Media Streams gives you a WebSocket with raw audio, you push it into a streaming STT, you feed the transcript to an LLM, you stream the…

  • Single-channel problem arises from phone line acting as both input and output
  • Mark frame provides honest signal for microphone control but not caller's hearing
  • Five conditions must be met for proper microphone gating and barge-in functionality

More from Sunday 9 August →