Inhoudsopgave van October 9, 2023 - TIME Magazine

Last September, eight radio-collared cheetahs made the 5,000- mile-long journey from Namibia to Kuno National Park in India. Their arrival marked the final phase of a 13-year-long effort called Project Cheetah, which aims to reintroduce the big cat species to India’s grasslands 70 years after they were hunted into oblivion. Project Cheetah entered its second year Sept. 18, but the fate of the high-profile conservation project is in doubt after nine out of 20 cheetahs, including three cubs, have died since March. Authorities have recaptured the remaining cats and kept them in enclosures for monitoring and supervision. The setbacks have raised concerns from an international community of conservationists involved in the project, who say inexperience and mismanagement—as well as the government’s politicization and sidelining of expert opinions—may have contributed…

Thirty years later, Liz Helms still remembers the way her doctor looked at her when she described the severe pain she was experiencing around her jaw—the limited facial movement and frequent muscle spasms, and feeling like she was being struck by lightning again and again. “I could see it in his face—he either wasn’t listening or didn’t believe me,” she says. Helms—who has a temporomandibular joint disorder—spent a year and a half fighting for the right treatment. The struggle inspired a career in patient advocacy: she now runs the California Chronic Care Coalition, and has launched an online resource, My Patient Rights, that helps people dissatisfied with their health care. “I decided to do something because I knew I wasn’t the only person … having these issues,” she says.…

Dario and Daniela Amodei CO-FOUNDERS | ANTHROPIC As siblings go, Dario and Daniela Amodei agree more than most. “Since we were kids, we’ve always felt very aligned,” Daniela says. Alignment is top of mind for the brother-and-sister duo at the helm of Anthropic, one of the world’s leading AI labs. In industry lingo, the term means ensuring AI systems are “aligned” with human values. Dario, 40, and Daniela, 36—CEO and president, respectively—believe they are taking a safer and more responsible approach to AI alignment than other companies building cutting-edge AI systems. Founded in 2021, Anthropic has carried out pioneering “mechanistic interpretability” research that aims to allow developers to perform something analogous to a brain scan—to see what’s really going on inside an AI system, rather than relying on text…

Geoffrey Hinton EMERITUS PROFESSOR | UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO Over the course of February, Geoffrey Hinton, one of the most influential AI researchers of the past 50 years, had a “slow eureka moment.” Hinton, 76, has spent his career trying to build AI systems that model the human brain, mostly in academia before joining Google in 2013. He had always believed that the brain was better than the machines that he and others were building, and that by making them more like the brain, they would improve. But in February, he realized “the digital intelligence we’ve got now may be better than the brain already. It’s just not scaled up quite as big.” Developers around the world are currently racing to build the biggest AI systems that they can. At…

Big Tech had a tough year, laying off tens of thousands of workers since January. But the biggest tech companies are also the ones doing best for investors, employees, and the planet. Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet (the company that owns Google), and Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook) were the top four companies in a new statistical ranking of 750 of the World’s Best Companies, by TIME and the data platform Statista. The rankings are based on a formula of revenue growth; employee-satisfaction surveys; and rigorous environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG, or sustainability) data. Tech companies performed well, alongside IT and consulting firm Accenture and financial-services company American Express, in part because their carbon emissions are lower than those of companies with significant physical footprints like airlines or big manufacturers. But…

Alondra Nelson RESEARCHER AND POLICY ADVISER When the Biden White House was tasked with responding to the rapid changes in generative AI last year, Alondra Nelson led the charge. As the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), Nelson oversaw the release of the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights last October. The document is not binding by law or enforceable, but lays a framework that she hopes both AI builders and policymakers will abide by in order to ensure that AI is a force for public good. “Fueled by the power of American innovation,” the document reads, “these tools hold the potential to redefine every part of our society and make life better for everyone.” Nelson also hopes the 73 pages will…

Martin Scorsese is wearing a blue shirt. It’s a nothing-special medium-dark blue, at least as it’s backlit by the afternoon sun streaming through the window. But later, in the crisp-soft light of the screening room located in his office, it becomes a blue of a different color, a hue you see most commonly in wildflowers, and in the movies. Almost iridescent, it shimmers toward purple; in an unreal sky, it would be the shifting point between dusk and outer space. It’s proof of the illusory nature of color, but as metaphors go, it’s a humble one, a trick of cloth and dye and light. Let’s call it—after the ace cinematographer behind the Technicolor marvels of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, among Scorsese’s favorites—Jack Cardiff Blue. Color is important to nearly…

The National Museum of the American Latino doesn’t even have a building yet, but its work is already controversial. For the past two years, historians had been working on an exhibit about the history of Latino youth movements. But after pushback from conservative Latinos in the private sector and the halls of Congress, that exhibit is on hold. A new one on Latin music is being developed in its place, the Smithsonian confirmed to TIME. The episode is part of a larger fight that will determine who gets to tell the history of Latinos in a museum dedicated to doing just that, on or near the National Mall that attracts millions of visitors each year, filing through the buildings that presume to tell the national story. The fate of the…

LAUNCHED Impeachment probe Aiming for Biden Under pressure from hard-right members, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy opened an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden on Sept. 12 over his family’s business dealings, despite an absence of evidence that Biden profited from them. The inquiry will center on whether Biden played a role in, or financially benefited from, his son Hunter’s overseas business affairs. It will also focus on whether other members of the Biden family illicitly used their proximity to power to enrich themselves, a source familiar tells TIME. But an investigation by the House Oversight Committee has not produced evidence that the President profited from his son’s business dealings, leading even some GOP legislators to dismiss an impeachment inquiry as politically motivated. Others, like Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene,…

Ted Chiang WRITER Ted Chiang is perhaps the world’s most celebrated living science-fiction author. His short, carefully hewn stories explore how our inner worlds and our societies would react to unexpected rifts in the fabric of science. How would it feel to receive a hormone injection that drastically improved your cognitive function? What if learning an alien language changed the way you perceived time? And if humanity were to create artificial life, what obligations would we owe it? Recently, Chiang, 56, has stepped into a new role. In nonfiction pieces for the New Yorker, he has emerged as one of the sharpest critics of AI and the corporations behind it. In one viral piece, he compared ChatGPT to “a blurry jpeg of the web,” arguing that the very technology…

Success doesn’t look the same for novelist Jessica Knoll as it did five years ago. In 2018, the Luckiest Girl Alive author raised both cheers and eyebrows when she wrote an op-ed for the New York Times titled “I Want to Be Rich and I’m Not Sorry.” That type of ambition may be the norm in finance or law, but in book publishing, where fiscal prosperity is elusive, artistic integrity is usually the professed goal. “Can we just say the quiet part out loud?” Knoll, 39, asks over a matcha latte at New York City’s ModernHaus hotel. “Women want to be financially successful but also love what they do. It’s perfectly possible for these two things to coexist.” She knows writers are expected to be “precious” about their art.…

My 15-year-old daughter and I recently went back to the beginning of The Great British Baking Show, and the technical abilities of the contestants seems like it’s just increased so much. I think it’s reflected in the handshakes [bakers get for stellar work], to be honest. The handshakes are more [frequent] because the standard of the baking has gone much higher. It attracted the better bakers. The show is a rare bastion of friendly competition. How have you maintained that over the years? There’s an honesty to Bake Off [as it’s known in the U.K.]. Sometimes my choice of words to describe what I’m looking at or tasting might be a little bit harsh. But I’m straight to the point. Other programs are quite destructive in their criticism, because all…