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June 15, 2026: The upside-down world

• Is tech the liberating force promised by Silicon Valley? Is AI freeing us up to live our best lives? Observations on driving up I-95 suggest differently. . .

• ‘Talk to My A.I. Twin’: Busy Executives Have a New Productivity Hack (gift link, NYT, June 6, 2026):

Lou Shipley, a former technology C.E.O. and a senior lecturer at H.B.S., teaches more than 500 students a year, and he has limited office hours. So he tried to offer his A.I. double for student meetings. “That didn’t go very well,” he said. “They actually want to meet me.”

[And] the C.E.O. of [a company that] makes software for measuring customer sentiment had a similar experience: He trained an A.I. double with about two million words of his content, and was impressed with the result. “I thought this is like magic,” he said. “This is really saving loads of time.”

[He] envisioned using the A.I. version of himself to answer presale queries and to respond when someone asked to pick his brain. But it didn’t take off. “It seems that human interaction is still a thing in 2026,” he said.

. . . as always, look at the trajectory. Today influencers want to sell access to LLMs trained on their material. Fine. But what happens when education - healthcare - finance - the justice system - all use AI, rather than human beings, as the primary interface?

• Massive Effigy of Elon Musk Raised Over Times Square to Protest Grok:

It was surrounded by black banners with statements alleging “Grok makes AI child porn” and “SpaceX owns Grok,” referring to the Musk-owned AI chatbot whose image generation tool was used to create a flood of sexualized images of minors earlier this year. Masked attendants stood nearby, handing out fliers with additional information, but would not speak with the media.

The demonstration was helmed by Safe AI Now (SAIN), which describes itself as “a coalition of faith leaders, family advocates, child development experts, online safety organizations, educators, legal professionals, technologists, and concerned citizens,”

• Musk is fond of suggesting that we may be “living in a simulation.” That only benefits the oligarchs who are happy to treat you as a string of bits, ready to be edited or erased.

• Meta Silently Added Face-Recognition Code for Its Smart Glasses to Millions of Phones (Wired, June 4, 2026):

Meta had begun shipping face-recognition code to users' phones while publicly describing it as something the company was still “thinking through.” In April, Meta said if it were to utilize face recognition, it wouldn't be rolled out without first taking "a very thoughtful approach." But WIRED found that as early as January, core components of the system had been integrated into software distributed to millions of people.

Though not yet enabled, NameTag sits inside a Meta AI companion app that's been downloaded over 50 million times and is necessary for use of key features of its smart glasses, including Ray-Ban and Oakley models. . . .

[Quoting EFF researcher Cooper Quintin:] “The feature is not yet exposed to consumers but seems nearly ready to go,” says Quintin. “Despite the billions of reasons not to, Meta seems to have created the capacity to turn their customers into a distributed surveillance machine.”

• In response, Meta Furious Over Bombshell Smart Glasses Revelation (Futurism, June 8, 2026). Facebook/Meta’s response is that Wired’s claims are “sensational,” “misleading,” and “dishonest,” adding –

Nothing has shipped to consumers and no final decision has been made on what to do here, if anything.

Right, because I’m sure they added that facial-recognition software for no particular reason.

• Meta Has a Ridiculous Amount of Smart Glasses Planned for This Year (Gizmodo, June 1, 2026):

The “supersensing” pair [of surveillance glasses] would have always-on cameras capable of looking at your surroundings without you having to prompt the voice assistant or activate the camera with a button. The idea here is that, with a constant stream of visual information, the smart glasses could be a kind of ambient virtual assistant that remembers where you left your keys or other vision-based reminders.

• Ronny Chieng Tells Harvard to ‘Destroy AI’ as Graduates Cheer (Harvard magazine, May 27, 2026):

“Can I just say f**k AI, f**k AI, f**k AI?” the comedian, actor, and rotating host of The Daily Show asked in his keynote speech during the Class Day celebration on Wednesday. The crowd at Tercentenary Theatre, made up of the graduating Class of 2026 and their friends and families, answered him with a roar of approval.

“I’m glad you agree,” Chieng said. “It’s so stupid. A lot of other respected graduation speakers at colleges around America are talking about you guys needing to master AI for the future. I’m here to tell you the mission of your generation is to destroy AI, kill it.”

• Your car is spying on you, and it's only just the beginning (May 13, 2026):

A federal law is about to increase the amount of data your car can gather about you. It will soon require American car companies to install infrared biometric cameras and other systems to scan your body language, track your eyes or other aspects of your behavoiur to detect whether you're too drunk or tired to drive. But it will also open up a whole new trove of data about your health and your habits. There are no rules limiting what the car companies can do with that information.

• And from the Big Tech company always boasting about its commitment to privacy:

• I am retiring from tech to live offline (Chris Whitacre, June 2026): “My intent is to be AI Amish, which means Internet Amish. Not 1780, but 1980. Neo-Amish. I’m fine driving a car and flipping a lightswitch, by which I mean that they don’t make me into something I hate, which AI and doomscrolling do.” . . . see also Maybe we should all go offline (by Mark Hurst, June 12, 2026):

Follow Mark on Bluesky or Mastodon.

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