Harrison Butker is going to be playing for another Super Bowl with the Kansas City Chiefs.

Butker nailed the game-winning field goal to send the Chiefs to their third Super Bowl in four years. 

In what was a terrific game, Butker was able to make multiple field goals to be able to take down Joe Burrow and the Cincinnati Bengals. The Chiefs will be facing the Philadelphia Eagles in two weeks in Arizona. 

Butker was able to score the first six points of the game, making a 43-yard field goal to take an early 3-0 lead. He then hit a 24-yard field goal at the start of the second quarter to get the Chiefs a 6-0 lead. Butker was perfect on his extra-point attempts as well and that has been a problem for him this year. 

Former Georgia Tech kicker Harrison Butker is heading to another Super Bowl

Denny Medley-USA TODAY Sports

Butker is going to be the only former Yellow Jacket in the Super Bowl this season. 

Butker has been one of the best kickers in the NFL for the past few seasons, but he has struggled with injuries and some misses this season. The good thing for the Chiefs is that he has been great during the postseason and even had a touchdown-saving tackle against the Jacksonville Jaguars. 

During the regular season, Butker is 18-24 on field goals and 38-41 on extra points. His six missed field goals are the most in his NFL career. 

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Bryan Johnson is a California-based Biotech CEO, who is 45 going on 18…No, really. The entrepreneur, along with a team of 30 doctors, is on a mission to biohack youthfulness by spending over $2 million (approximately ₹16 crore) annually. According to a Bloomberg report, the experimental programme titled Project Blueprint consists of a strict vegan diet of 1,977 calories daily, high intensity exercise, consistent bedtime, regular ultrasounds, MRIs, colonoscopies and blood tests to make Johnson have the health of an 18-year-old. He even has a machine to monitor the number of erections at night, which are reportedly similar to a teenager’s.

His day starts with two dozen supplements and a green juice with creatine and collagen peptides, and tracking of his body fat, heart rate variations and blood glucose levels. He also dons blue-light-blocking glasses, which filter the brain-stimulating blue rays from electronic devices, two hours before hitting the sack.

The efforts to stop time in its tracks have shown early results with doctors saying the software CEO now has the heart of a 37-year-old, the skin of a 28-year-old, and the lung capacity of an 18-year-old, gum inflammation of a 17-year-old and a record reversal of at least 5 years overall.

Led by Oliver Zolman, a 29-year-old physician who aims to prove that humans can decrease the medical age of their organs by 25%, charges $1,000 hourly for the medical tests undertaken by Johnson.

The CEO of KernelCo, a startup that manufactures $50,000-apiece helmets that analyze brain signals, has also started a website called Rejuvenation Olympics which ranks 1750 people who are striving to reverse their age, with Johnson topping the charts.

In his 30s, after selling his company Braintree Payment Solutions to EBay for $800 million, his mental and physical health went for a toss due to the stressful lifestyle. He was inspired to chase youthfulness after battling depression and obesity. He now aspires for all his major organs — including brain, liver, kidneys, teeth, penis and rectum — to be as healthy as a teen’s.

• 
  ABOUT THE AUTHOR
  

  Multimedia journalist with Hindustan Times. Covers India, world, business and tech news with a keen eye for human-interest stories rooted in gender and culture.
  …view detail

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It can be tough to keep up with the ever-evolving news at the intersection of architecture and technology. But fear not, dear readers—AN has you covered with a new-in-tech mini-roundup on the biohomes, metaverse house tours, and AI tastemaking to inform your practice and add to your “fun fact” cocktail hour conversation Rolodex:

University of Maine unveils first 3D home made from fully-recyclable, bio-based materials

Along with many other states and cities, Maine is facing an affordable housing crisis. 3D-printed homes, which often require less time and less labor to build on-site, may offer a solution to a challenging housing shortage. In that spirit, late last year researchers at the University of Maine Advanced Structures and Composites Center (ASCC) celebrated the completion of BioHome3D, the first 3D-printed home made with bio-based materials.

The 600-square-foot prototype’s 3D-printed roof is made of wood fibers and bio-resins, while the insulation is 100 percent wood material. The floors and walls are 3D-printed, as well. It was constructed from locally-sourced materials to reduce dependence on a global supply chain that’s weathered many shocks and crises since 2020.

BioHome3D was printed in four modules offsite; on-site assembly required only a half-day’s work.

“Many technologies are being developed to 3D print homes, but unlike BioHome3D, most are printed using concrete. However, only the concrete walls are printed on top of a conventionally cast concrete foundation. Traditional wood framing or wood trusses are used to complete the roof,” ASCC Executive Director Dr. Habib Dagher said in a press release. “Unlike the existing technologies, the entire BioHome3D was printed, including the floors, walls and roof. The biomaterials used are 100% recyclable, so our great-grandchildren can fully recycle BioHome3D.”

Future versions of the home could be customized to meet an owner’s space and energy needs. Right now, ASCC is monitoring the home’s performance through the bone-chilling Maine winter. These data will be used to inform BioHome3D’s future iterations.

Is the Scottish Parliament the world’s ugliest building? (Andrew Cowan/Scottish Parliament/Wikimedia Commons/Open Scottish Parliament Licence)

Buildworld uses sentiment analysis tool to make list of world’s ugliest buildings

Using sentiment analysis tool HuggingFace, a team at building materials and products retailer Buildworld compiled a list of the world’s ugliest buildings. The team began with a list of buildings across the U.K. and U.S. often assumed to be “ugly” and ran the building names through HuggingFace, a machine learning platform trained to detect positive and negative tones about a topic or idea. The platform draws on tweets to analyze what is being said online about the buildings. The ugliest accolade is determined by, in this case, the percentage of negative sentiment on the building.

The machine has spoken and determined the worst eyesore to be the Scottish Parliament Building in Edinburgh, pictured above, a postmodern structure by architect Enric Miralles that had 42.07 percent of analyzed tweets critical of its design. Stateside, the J. Edgar Hoover Building a.k.a. the FBI Headquarters, was found to be the worst, with 37.84 percent of tweets criticizing its design. The Brutalist Boston City Hall building took second place. Chicago’s Thomson Center and the Watergate Complex also made it to the United States’ top ten list.

More information about the experiment and the full list of ugly buildings can be found here.

New discovery on the durable property of ancient Roman concrete

A research team from MIT, Harvard University, and laboratories in Italy and Switzerland has unearthed some secrets about a tried-and-true building material and method that’s just about as old as time: concrete. Their findings, which were published in the journal Science Advances earlier this month, provide evidence into the hearty material’s durability and self-healing nature.

It had been previously assumed that ancient concrete’s strength came from a pozzolanic material such as volcanic ash, but the discovery of “lime clasts,” tiny white minerals found in samples, is likely where the material gets its durability. Scientists had previously dismissed lime clasts as flecks left over from poor mixing technique, but now researchers are reviewing that conclusion.

Further study of the lime clasts determined they were made from calcium carbonate. A spectroscopic examination of the flecks led the team of researchers to deduce they were mixed into concrete at very hot temperatures and it is this process and step that solidifies concrete’s durability.

With this discovery, ancient buildings and statues with cracks can be repaired or made whole again, extending the life of structures and reducing the need for cement production which can have detrimental environmental impacts. It also opens the opportunity for new construction, namely 3D-printed buildings, which continue to rise in popularity as an alternative building material and method.

A national homebuilder is giving house tours in the metaverse

KB Home is inviting prospective clients to suit up an avatar and explore its model homes virtually. The homebuilding company created a showroom on the Decentraland platform for buyers to tour houses in contemporary, Spanish, farmhouse and craftsman styles. A virtual host is on hand to answer questions about the homes, the construction process, and customization options.

“KB Home has a long-standing history of groundbreaking innovation. Today, we’re creating opportunities with an eye toward the future, so next-gen homebuyers can experience a new KB Home community virtually,” KB Home Chairman, President and CEO Jeffrey Mezger said in a news release. “We know consumers are increasingly immersing themselves and spending more time in virtual spaces. KB Home’s metaverse community is all about discovery and creation and provides a captivating setting for homebuyers to explore what truly sets us apart – innovative design, personalization and partnership.”

The Los Angeles–based company partnered with The Metaverse Group to design and build out its Decentraland KB Home nirvana.

Screenshot of the Reset Earth Impact Simulator game (United Nations Environment Programme Ozone Secretariat)

The UN makes protecting the ozone layer into an online game

This week the UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Ozone Secretariat launched its latest version of a simulator designed to help teens understand how to protect our precious, life-sustaining environments and ecosystems via global and local policy interventions.

The Apollo’s Edition of the Reset Earth Impact Simulator game  allows students pick from four possible policy directions that impact the ozone layer. Apollo, a spunky, blue-haired avatar, pictured above, and her robot companion lay out the scenarios while educating students on the Montreal Protocol, the multilateral agreement that regulates ozone depleting substances (ODS).

“By giving young people innovative learning tools, we hope to inspire them to become the future scientists and policy-makers championing environmental protection,” said Meg Seki, Executive Secretary of the Ozone Secretariat.

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A woman from Pennsylvania was arrested on Jan 25 after being identified as the suspect in a tech support scheme that scammed New Jersey residents, Bergen County Prosecutor Mark Musella said.

Mona Sethi, 65, of Furlong, Pennsylvania, has been charged with money laundering, theft by deception and two conspiracy offenses, all second-degree crimes, officials said.

The Waldwick Police Department contacted the Prosecutor’s Office in September 2022, reporting an international tech support scam that was affecting residents, authorities said.

Investigators found that the scam was targeting people in New Jersey as well as other states, officials said.

The scammers were tricking users into believing that their computers were compromised and offering to repair their systems for a fee, authorities said. Victims were later instructed to provide remote access to their computers, allowing the scammers to commit additional fraudulent acts, according to prosecutors.

Detectives alleged Sethi was the perpetrator who created a shell company called Micro Technical Services as well as bank accounts that transferred victims’ funds to India, officials said.

Sethi is in custody in Pennsylvania and awaiting extradition to New Jersey. – nj.com/Tribune News Service

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The M2 Pro Mac Mini fills out its case.

Apple’s new M2 Pro Mac Mini comes with more power than any Mini before it. And unlike the M1 or M2 versions, the M2 Pro model actually fills out the spacious Mini case with a larger logic board and more powerful power supply. Unsurprisingly, the M2 Pro model also borrows some internal design ideas from the Mac Studio.

YouTuber Luke Miani has taken it down to the metal to see exactly what’s different with the M2 Pro Mini and the models before it. And when you’re done watching that, check out Chris Welch’s review.

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Three months ago, electric vehicle company Lightyear said that it had started production of its €250,000 (around $270,000) Lightyear 0, which boasted an expansive array of solar panels capable of adding up to 44 miles of range to the car. Well, the company has now announced that it’s halting production of the 0 in order to focus on the sub-$40,000 Lightyear 2 coming in 2025. It’s not great news for the fledgling startup, whichever way you cut it.

Meanwhile, a Bloomberg report has shed new light on Apple’s long-rumored AR / VR headset, which is expected to launch this spring. The good news is that it’s expected to be packed with premium technology like advanced hand tracking and face-tracked FaceTime calls. The bad news is that this technology apparently won’t come cheap, with the headset expected to cost around $3,000. Sounds like it’ll be an early-adopter product for the foreseeable future. If you’re after something more affordable and current, why not check out the Meta Quest 2, which now uses more advanced hand-tracking software by default.

For now, here’s a silly tweet to start your day:

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The technology sector is routinely cited by leading members of the government as one of the UK’s economic bright spots. Recently, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt pledged to make the UK the “world’s next Silicon Valley”, while the prime minister vowed the UK must become “the most innovative economy in the world”.

Tech is already a key part of the UK economy. Between 2010 and 2019 the tech sector’s contribution to the UK grew by 25% and that figure keeps on rising, with UK tech now adding over £150bn to the economy every year. In the same period, jobs in the sector have increased by a third, with over 1.7 million people in the country now working in tech.

The sector’s growth is not just good in its own right. More tech companies mean greater availability of digital services, more innovative hardware, and more digitally skilled people that can be spun out into the rest of our economy and society.

Nearly every business sector and public service has a strategy for improvement based on digitisation and better use of technology. We need to see the UK tech sector as the engine of growth for our whole society and economy.

Yet, while our technology sector has done well, for the first time in its modern history there is a crisis of confidence among parts of the industry. In techUK’s last digital economy survey we saw a big drop in confidence, with more than a third (34%) of members surveyed saying they now believe that business conditions in the UK were more likely to get worse than better.

2022 did not end well for the sector, as a market correction following on from the energy and cost of living crisis has seen major redundancies in some firms while access to talent remains a critical growth constraint for others.

At the same time, the government has cut key support for the sector – reducing the value of the UK’s R&D tax credit and cancelling the Help to Grow: Digital programme. These cuts, and the delay to the rollout of making tax digital, are hurting both our most innovative firms as well as SMEs who are looking to digitise.

While the UK remains ahead of its peers in Europe in terms of the amount of investment being pulled in, our competitors, in particular France, have made significant gains by exploiting the UK’s poor trading relationship with the EU and through a focused strategy on tech sector growth.

When it comes to tech, the UK cannot rest on its laurels. The rhetoric from the government is welcome. However, it is action, not words, that will be needed to restore the confidence of the UK tech sector and ensure we remain one of the world’s premier technology destinations.

Spring Budget – an opportunity for UK tech

To do so the chancellor needs to use his upcoming Spring Budget on 15 March to deliver a shot in the arm for the sector, with key announcements that show the government still sees tech as one of the UK’s modern economic success stories.

There are ideas in the pipeline that could help do this. The review into regulatory reform being led by Sir Patrick Vallance offers an opportunity for some quick wins that could benefit key parts of the tech sector such as drones, telecoms, and space technologies.

Acting fast to reform the UK’s R&D tax credit regime to reduce fraud and refocus the credit on research-intensive companies would also send good signals to the sector that the drop in government support last year was not the beginning of a trend.

As well as these immediate actions, the government also needs to set out some longer-term signals, particularly around how the UK will build a talent pipeline over the next decade to ensure we meet our targets to roll out gigabit-capable broadband and 5G.

We need to see action and a reversal of the recent trend of blowing hot and cold on tech from ministers if we are to meet the ambition to turn the UK into the next Silicon Valley. techUK and our members will be playing an important role in feeding ideas into government in the coming weeks with all eyes on the House of Commons dispatch box come 15 March.

Neil Ross is the associate director of policy at techUK.

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With the global tech downturn continuing to wreak havoc on companies large and small, investors have been re-evaluating how they approach tech financing.

Funding for UK tech startups fell 22% in 2022 thanks to a significant downturn in the second half of the year. Smaller funding rounds and lower valuations have become commonplace compared to the record-breaking heyday of 2021.

For many investors and founders, the question on their minds will be ‘how long will it last?’ Could it be that investors and startups alike are experiencing, to use a somewhat worn-out phrase in 2023, a new normal? Or is it a temporary blip that will be forgotten in a month or so?

And if these conditions do last, how should investors and founders navigate them?

To get a better sense of the risks, opportunities, and duration of this tech downturn, UKTN spoke to three investors at UK-based VCs.

‘Predictability rather than high growth

The consensus among venture capitalists in the UK appears to be that safer bets in reliable companies, operating in dependable sectors, and offering a clear path to profitability are the ones that will emerge from the storm.

“Like many other investors, we are increasingly focussed on capital efficient models and predictability, rather than high-growth,” says Stephen Chandler, co-founder and managing partner of Notion Capital.

This is echoed by Luke Smith, investment partner at Forward Partners: “You can’t just get strong growth and count on a later-stage investor to come in and give you a nice uplift, you have to have a company that’s building solid fundamentals and real value.

“And that means you have to look more carefully at the product at the team at the market to make sure that you’re backing something that’s a real product.”

Early-stage opportunities

Some areas of tech have been affected more than others by the downturn. And while there is cause for concern across the board, there are also opportunities that can come from difficult economic periods –  for both investors and startups at earlier stages.

“We’ve seen it [the economic downturn] as a great opportunity to find new companies at an early stage in the market,” says Barry Downes, managing partner of Sure Valley Ventures.

“Because we’re seed [investors], we’ve taken the view that this is a great opportunity for us to go out and find great new companies and support founders’ growth.”

Downes explains that investors focused on early-stage companies can not only avoid the problems that the later-stage companies have, such as big costs and bloated valuations, but actually benefit in a way that was not possible before.

“At that early stage, what the change in the macro environment has done, has actually made it a better opportunity for us,” Downes said.

Startups need money, and while this has always been the case, there is a lot of power being granted to the backers who are there from the beginning and can take a significant portion of a new business that needs a boost.

And it’s not just the early-stage investors that can benefit either, according to Downes.

“It’s [also] a better opportunity for early-stage founders to create a business. Now is actually a great time to do that because they’ll be able to get access to highly talented people and build their teams more easily as well.”

“On the surface, I think it could look like it’s slightly more risky because there’s a general macro environment out there that’s not as positive as it was… but I think it’s not in reality for seed VCs.”

Longer runway during economic uncertainty

Given the current period of economic uncertainty, investors and the startups they back have had to put a great deal of consideration on the cash runway available after a funding round.

“If we invest in a company now, the company is going to be cashed up for a minimum of two years,” Downes tells UKTN.

The Sure Valley managing partner’s approach is that tech downturns are, to some extent, cyclical, meaning being able to survive during that difficult period means thriving when it ends.

“Our view of the future is, things might get a little bit worse this year, but then they start to get better, and the macro climate will get a little bit better towards the end of the year, and then we’ll be in recovery next year and the year after,” says Downes.

Chandler agrees with this sentiment: “We like to ensure longer cash runways given the increased funding risk in the market. We are seeing some good opportunities for extension rounds into companies with decent commercial evidence at far more attractive prices than 2021.”

How long will the downturn last?

Ensuring a startup has enough runway to weather the economic storm is clearly important, but they will still be wondering how long the storm will last.

“We’ll start to see improvement at the back end of this year, but I don’t think we’ll be back to the 2021 environment anytime soon,” says Smith.

“The shift of crossover funds into the space and just the massive availability of later-stage funding. In hindsight, I’m not sure that’s coming back, certainly not anytime soon.”

Smith points to on-demand rapid-delivery grocery startups as an example of a “capital inefficient” space that might have received large amounts of funding and attention in 2021 but will not again “for a good few years”.

Chandler adds that he expects the current conditions to last throughout the year, with a “partial recovery” in 2024 and, optimistically, “back to a more normal market thereafter”.

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NOAA has predicted that there is a 60 percent chance of M-class solar flare today due to a giant sunspot which is facing the Earth.

A giant sunspot detected on the surface of the Sun has raised fears of a strong Solar flare being spewed out that may hit Earth. NOAA forecasters warned that there is a 60 percent chance of an M-class solar flare and a 15 percent chance of X-class flare. It must be noted that an X-class solar flare denotes one of the most intense flares. Basically, solar flares are classified into four classes – A, B, C, M, and X, based on their intensity. Solar flares are intense bursts of radiation coming from the release of magnetic energy, from a Sunspot.

The report from SpaceWeather.com suggested that the main source of these strong solar flares is a giant sunspot AR3190. The worrying part is that this sunspot is facing Earth, which increases the chances of direct impact on our planet. Not just that, it is one of the largest sunspots of the current Solar Cycle 25, which is at its peak. “It’s almost five times the diameter of Earth, and could be seen through the thick humid atmosphere over the Gulf of Mexico,” David J Kriegler, one of the observers, told Spaceweather.com.

The giant size of the sunspot makes it an easy catch for amateur astronomers. You don’t need any solar telescope to witness this huge sunspot AR3190. Eclipse glasses work best here. However, you need to be cautious! “Even when the sun is dimmed by low clouds or haze, looking directly through the camera can damage your eyes. Always use the LCD screen for view finding,” SpaceWeather.com report mentioned.

Tech behind Solar Flare detection

From NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), many agencies keep a constant track of these solar flares. Then there is the DSCOVR satellite, which tracks different measurements of the Sun and its atmosphere including temperature, speed, density, degree of orientation and frequency of the solar particles. The recovered data is then run through the Space Weather Prediction Center and the final analysis is prepared.

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As the casualties of “progress” pile up, the self-assured march of AI and other newfangled technologies onto society demands a critical evaluation.

Why is crypto a thing, still?

There’s the paranoid fear that a spooky cabal of technocrats at the Federal Reserve — unaccountable, incomprehensible — might one day make ordinary money go poof! There’s the success of the young bros who minted a fortune convincing other young bros to embrace the thing — luring a generation with dim job prospects anyway to take a shot at getting rich from their bedroom.

Can that be all, though? You might expect some urgency to find a purpose for a technology that consumes more power than Australia, yet hasn’t been able to develop a real-world function other than paying for ransom, drugs or child porn. But once you get past the greater fool theory, you are left with little more than a slogan: It’s hi-tech.

I’m talking about a problem that goes way beyond crypto: the lack of purpose, the absence of a reason for society to keep churning out more “new, new things,” despite the costs, driven by a narrative contrived in Silicon Valley that features technology, any technology, inevitably powering human progress.

In the valley’s telling, interrogating this progress is best left to the Luddites. But the self-assured march of newfangled technologies onto society demands a critical evaluation. Because the casualties of progress are piling up, calling into question why we’re deploying such technologies in the first place.

The social consequences of social media are chilling not just for their proven potential to distort the national conversation, spreading misinformation too fast for the truth to catch up. As many observers have also complained, they are substituting online social connections for real ones, building alternate realities open to manipulation in pursuit of profit.

Deployed by corporate managers to automate processes and take over increasingly complex decisions, robots have built a better rep. But the reputation relies on unexamined assumptions: First, that automation necessarily improves firm profitability; second, that the fruits of this progress will be shared broadly across society.

Companies that become more productive, the story goes, will expand production and hire more workers. Automation will also create new tasks within firms for humans to do. Incomes rising in line with productivity will generate demand for new products and services, further boosting employment. And the additional competition for labor will drive up wages.

But while these propositions make sense, at first blush, they don’t really fit what we are seeing in the real world, where employment growth mostly takes place at cheap labor joints like McDonald’s and 7-Eleven. Anybody who thinks the gains from automation are being broadly shared hasn’t been paying attention.

A new vein of economic research into the consequences of technological change has found that technology’s bias toward automation can account for most of the rise in wage inequality, polarizing the labor market between less-educated workers who are displaced from their tasks and see their wages fall and those — mainly college graduates or postgraduates — who are not.

Technology does call for new tasks, opening the door to new jobs, but they too are biased toward the highly educated and offer little to the workers with only basic skills whose tasks were taken over by the machines.

Research by economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern University and the University of Utrecht found that the economy created a lot of middle-wage production and clerical jobs from 1940 to 1980. But lots of those are now gone. The jobs created since then have been either highly paid professional positions or low-wage service gigs.

And just you wait for Artificial Intelligence to hit its stride. What Google CEO Sundar Pichai calls “the most important thing humanity has ever worked on” will open whole new realms of human activity to what the money in the valley likes to call “disruption.” The workers displaced by the next version of ChatGPT will get to play their usual role in the narrative of progress: roadkill.

The problem with progress is not just in the way its fruits are shared. The very gains are coming into question. You may remember Elon Musk’s acknowledgment that “humans are underrated,” a rare admission of error after his attempts to automate Tesla’s assembly lines led to delays and malfunctions. The mistake is common: Technology’s contributions to productivity are often hard to find.

As Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology observes, a lot of automation delivers only a so-so boost to the bottom line. Think of automated customer service or touchscreens at McDonald’s. Managers automate anyway for two reasons: It’s “progress” and everybody’s doing it, and the costs imposed on workers displaced by the new technologies are, to the firm, irrelevant. So even if the returns are vanishingly small, they are worth it.

Innovation, by some measures, is happening at a blistering pace. In 2020 the US patent office issued more than 350,000 patents for inventions, almost six times as many as in 1980, at the dawn of the digital revolution. But total factor productivity in this period grew barely 0.7% per year, on average, less than a third of the growth rate from the 1940s through the 1970s.

While the techno-optimists in Cupertino and Mountain View tend to dismiss the dismal numbers as mismeasurement — data crunchers missing all the good stuff — many serious scholars are coming around to the idea that all the awesome IT will not necessarily bring about a productivity revolution.

Innovation is undeniably a cool thing. Because of it, we survive diseases that regularly used to kill us. We can access and process unimaginable amounts of information. Without new technologies we would never meet the challenge to decarbonize the economy and contain climate change.

But as Acemoglu and his MIT colleague Simon Johnson point out in their forthcoming book, Power and Progress (due out in May), contemporary evidence and the long story of humanity’s technological development confirm “there is nothing automatic about new technologies bringing widespread prosperity. Whether they do or not is an economic, social, and political choice.”

Silicon Valley, they argue, should not feel entitled to make the call. With the venture capital industry chasing opportunities for AI to take over an increasing array of tasks and decisions — playing Go, practicing law, analyzing markets — Acemoglu and Johnson fear technological progress is driving society down a dark path.

What if instead of increasing productivity, AI simply redistributes power and prosperity away from ordinary folks and toward those who control the data? What if it impoverishes billions in the developing world — whose cheap workers cannot compete with cheaper automata? What if it reinforces biases based on, say, skin color? What if it destroys democratic institutions?

“The evidence is mounting,” they write, “that all these concerns are valid.”

We can avoid Skynet. Technology needn’t lead us to some oligarchic dystopia. The last 150 years are crowded with technological breakthroughs that empowered workers and lifted all boats.

Think of the mouse and the graphic computer interface, or Excel, or email. These inventions extended human capabilities, rather than extinguishing them. Arguably the most consequential technological revolution in our history, the transformation of an agricultural economy into an industrial powerhouse, left the working class much better off.

We have amazing technological tools at our disposal. The question is whether we deploy them in a way that complements humans or discards them like redundant castoffs of the march toward progress.

It may not be obvious how to deploy technology along a more human-centric path; build tools that amplify what humanity can do. One thing is clear, though. It will require wresting the unchallenged decision over the direction of innovation from a tech oligarchy that profits from human displacement and social alienation.

Then we might build a social media platform that is not optimized to spread misinformation, capture viewers’ attention and maximize ad revenue. We might not replace corporate America’s customer service workers with machines that provide no such thing. And we might not accept the acceleration of climate change just so we can find a new way to pay for illegal stuff.

More From Other Writers at Bloomberg Opinion: AI Has Come to Save the Arts from Themselves: Leonid Bershidsky ChatGPT Is No Magic Bullet for Microsoft’s Bing: Parmy Olson Why the Future of Technology Is So Hard to Predict: Faye Flam This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Eduardo Porter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Latin America, US economic policy and immigration. He is the author of ‘American Poison: How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise’ and ‘The Price of Everything: Finding Method in the Madness of What Things Cost.’

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