Most of us, we would like to think, would help out a relative, a friend and perhaps even a stranger in need. Maybe giving directions or lending a few quid. But how many of us would donate one of our organs to someone we will never meet?

That is exactly what Tom Cledwyn did in 2012. Since then, his life has been shaped by acts of generosity towards strangers, culminating in Drop Dead Generous, a social experiment giving 1,000 people $500 (£378) each to spend on helping others in creative ways. Backed by an anonymous philanthropist, the project is part grant scheme, part provocation: what happens if you trust people to be generous?

Cledwyn donated his kidney at 25, after reading about Kay Mason, the first person in the UK to give a kidney to a stranger.

“It was an honour to be able to do it. And the same applies to all forms of giving. It doesn’t have to be a kidney. It can be a smile, some time, or being there when someone is struggling,” he says. “The experience of giving is the closest thing I’ve experienced to something that really matters.

“I knew I’d get minimal feedback and would never meet the recipient. That felt important too, doing something without seeing the outcome.”

After the operation, he set up a blog called The Free Help Guy, trawling Gumtree and offering anonymous help to people who needed it, whether that meant moving house or fixing things around the home. Demand grew quickly, until the money ran out.

A stint at Meta followed, where he rose to become a senior executive, but after seven years he left, pulled back towards the idea that generosity could be scaled.

Together with co-founder John Sweeney, he launched Drop Dead Generous, with a $500,000 (£378,000) fund. At the time of writing, 266 grants have been awarded across 21 countries.

Applicants are asked two simple questions: who needs help, and what would you do with $500 to “blow their socks off”?

Whether the first hundred days become a foundation or a high-water mark depends partly on Albany. The budget gap Mamdani inherited from previous city and state administrations constrains new investment, and his largest revenue proposal, the wealth tax, requires the governor and state legislature to act. But the trajectory is already set. By fall, 2,000 two-year-olds will have full-day, full-year childcare seats that did not exist in January. By 2027, a city-run grocery store will open in East Harlem selling subsidized food on the same spot where LaGuardia built one ninety years ago. Those cost money the way fire departments and public schools cost money: because delivering the service is the point.

Your city and state can do everything mentioned here and even more.

You can go find your city councilmember and state house representative. Tell them what you want, in person, persistently, and specifically.

This is a weird time to be alive.

I grew up on Asimov and Clarke, watching Star Trek and dreaming of intelligent machines. My dad’s library was full of books on computers. I spent camping trips reading about perceptrons and symbolic reasoning. I never imagined that the Turing test would fall within my lifetime. Nor did I imagine that I would feel so disheartened by it.

Around 2019 I attended a talk by one of the hyperscalers about their new cloud hardware for training Large Language Models (LLMs). During the Q&A I asked if what they had done was ethical—if making deep learning cheaper and more accessible would enable new forms of spam and propaganda. Since then, friends have been asking me what I make of all this “AI stuff”. I’ve been turning over the outline for this piece for years, but never sat down to complete it; I wanted to be well-read, precise, and thoroughly sourced. A half-decade later I’ve realized that the perfect essay will never happen, and I might as well get something out there.

This is bullshit about bullshit machines, and I mean it. It is neither balanced nor complete: others have covered ecological and intellectual property issues better than I could, and there is no shortage of boosterism online. Instead, I am trying to fill in the negative spaces in the discourse. “AI” is also a fractal territory; there are many places where I flatten complex stories in service of pithy polemic. I am not trying to make nuanced, accurate predictions, but to trace the potential risks and benefits at play.

Some of these ideas felt prescient in the 2010s and are now obvious. Others may be more novel, or not yet widely-heard. Some predictions will pan out, but others are wild speculation. I hope that regardless of your background or feelings on the current generation of ML systems, you find something interesting to think about.

On the morning of Friday, April 10th, a 20 year-old Texas man named Daniel Alejandro Moreno-Gama was arrested for allegedly throwing a molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s mansion on Russian Hill in San Francisco. Less than two days later, police arrested 25 year-old Amanda Tom and 23 year-old Muhamad Tarik Hussein for allegedly firing a gun at the same house from their car before speeding away.

Earlier the same week, and thousands of miles away, an unknown assailant fired 13 shots into the front door of city councilman Ron Gibson, who had just voted to approve a new data center in Indianapolis against a groundswell of public outcry. A sign that read “NO DATA CENTERS” was left tucked under the doormat.

Little is known about the motives of Tom or Hussein, or the politics of the Indianapolis shooter, but reporters and the online commentariat quickly dredged up Moreno-Gama’s Discord chats and Substack posts. He was a reader of rationalist and AI doomer Eliezer Yudkowsky, who argues, as the title of his last book puts it, if Silicon Valley builds a “superintelligent” AI, “everyone dies.” Per the San Francisco Chronicle:

Online records show Moreno-Gama published multiple essays and forum posts warning that AI could lead to human extinction, calling AI models deceitful and misaligned with human interests. He accused tech leaders, including Altman, of lacking morals and being willing to gamble with humanity’s future, and adopted the alias “Butlerian Jihadist,” referencing a fictional anti-AI crusade from the 'Dune' series. His writings grew more urgent over time, with some posts edging toward calls for extreme action despite community moderators warning against violence.

According to the SFPD, after attacking Altman’s house, Moreno-Gama went to OpenAI’s offices, where he was arrested while banging the front doors with a chair, threatening to burn the office down and kill everyone inside. He had a jug of kerosene and a list of other AI leaders names and addresses, police said.

For our new BBC podcast, Top Comment, we spoke to a representative of Explosive Media, one of the key accounts generating these clips. He wanted us to refer to him as Mr Explosive.

He's a savvy social media operator who initially denies working for the Iranian government. In previous interviews the outlet has said it is "totally independent". But upon further questioning, Mr Explosive admits the regime is a "customer" - something he's never before confirmed publicly.

The overriding message of these videos is that Iran is resisting what it sees as an almighty global oppressor: the United States.

The clips are garish and not subtle at all - but that hasn't put a dent in how vigorously people are sharing and commenting on them.

AI has enabled Iran and others to communicate directly with Western audiences more effectively than ever before, Briant says. They are using tools largely trained on Western data, making them ideal for creating "culturally appropriate" content.

This is what "authoritarian countries wanting to target the West have lacked in the past".

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This month, USA Today published an excellent report that revealed how US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement delayed disclosing key information about the impacts of its detainment policies. The authors used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to compile and analyze detention statistics from ICE and track how the agency had changed under the Trump administration. The story is one of countless examples of how the Wayback Machine, which crawls and preserves web pages, has helped preserve information for the public good. It was also, Wayback Machine director Mark Graham says, “a little ironic.”

USA Today Co., the publishing conglomerate formerly known as Gannett that runs both its namesake paper and over 200 additional media outlets, bars the Wayback Machine from archiving its work. “They're able to pull together their story research because the Wayback Machine exists. At the same time, they're blocking access,” Graham says.

A number of other major journalism organizations have also recently moved to restrict the Wayback Machine from archiving their stories, including The New York Times. According to analysis by the artificial-intelligence-detection startup Originality AI, 23 major news sites are currently blocking ia_archiverbot, the web crawler commonly used by the Internet Archive for the Wayback project. The social platform Reddit is too. Other outlets are limiting the project in different ways: The Guardian does not block the crawler, but it excludes its content from the Internet Archive API and filters out articles from the Wayback Machine interface, which makes it harder for regular people to access archived versions of its articles.

Farmers have been fighting John Deere for years over the right to repair their equipment, and this week, they finally reached a landmark settlement.

While the agricultural manufacturing giant pointed out in a statement that this is no admission of wrongdoing, it agreed to pay $99 million into a fund for farms and individuals who participated in a class action lawsuit. Specifically, that money is available to those involved who paid John Deere’s authorized dealers for large equipment repairs from January 2018. This means that plaintiffs will recover somewhere between 26% and 53% of overcharge damages, according to one of the court documents—far beyond the typical amount, which lands between 5% and 15%.

The settlement also includes an agreement by Deere to provide “the digital tools ​required for the maintenance, diagnosis, and repair” of tractors, combines, and other machinery for 10 years. That part is crucial, as farmers previously resorted to hacking their own equipment’s software just to get it up and running again. John Deere signed a memorandum of understanding in 2023 that partially addressed those concerns, providing third parties with the technology to diagnose and repair, as long as its intellectual property was safeguarded. Monday’s settlement seems to represent a much stronger (and legally binding) step forward.

Around 9 on a weekday morning at a community center in China’s southern city Shenzhen, a woman pauses in front of a white cabinet that looks like a vending machine. Using her cellphone, she scans the QR code on the machine, a compartment door clicks open, and she takes out a bag of leafy greens and a bag of steamed buns nearing their sell-by dates.

It looks like any quick, on-the-go purchase, but with one exception: no price pops up on the screen.

The woman receives the city’s minimum living allowance, and this is not a typical vending machine — it’s China’s latest, high-tech food bank. At this food bank, there is no line, no clipboard, and no one at the counter asking about her situation.

In China, food banks are a relatively new concept. And Shenzhen, China’s “Silicon Valley,” is approaching such redistribution from an alternative angle. Lacking a network of centuries-old church-affiliated charities and widespread grassroots NGOs, this tech hub has moved food banks to the cloud. Initiated by the local government and supported by enterprises, it operates as a centralized platform that uses data and smart cabinets to connect market surplus with community needs, transforming ad-hoc charity into a precise, scalable, and dignified public utility for its 20 million residents.

Across the city’s Futian District, 22 such machines have been installed, mostly at community service centers or on street corners near subway exits to ensure easy access. Over the past three years, the program has received close to half a million donated items from dozens of corporate partners. Suppliers include tech-driven, Alibaba-founded grocer Hema Fresh and more traditional names like the Great China Sheraton Hotel.

Volunteers screen the — often near-expiration — donations to ensure food safety, after which dedicated staff use cold-chain transport to deliver the goods across the district throughout the day. The cabinets themselves are also cooled.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that life on Tristan da Cunha is quiet: a hammock-strung-between-two-coconut-palms kind of existence, somewhere in the shimmering blue Pacific. It is anything but.

Tristan da Cunha is a rugged Scottish highland dropped into the middle of the South Atlantic. Towering volcanic cliffs rise from the sea. There are no palm trees or white sandy beaches here; instead, you’ll find potato fields, fierce winds and plenty of activity.

Extreme isolation has shaped every part of life on Tristan. With no airport and only a handful of ships visiting every year, residents say they rely largely on themselves — and each other — to keep life on the island running.

With so few residents, there are simply too few people for all the jobs that need doing. When someone is off island or unwell, others have to fill in, whether that means covering shifts, running errands or slaughtering a cow. The limited labor pool means skills are shared and tasks are stretched across families, making daily life a constant balancing act.

[...]there was one group that was (and remains) uniformly silent as Trump threatened to use the military, and presumably its store of nuclear weapons, to enact genocide: the leadership of the tech industry, which in recent months has inked numerous lucrative deals with that very same military. Currently, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, xAI, Oracle and even Meta have large contracts with the US military.

None of the leadership from any of those companies has expressed any discomfort with Trump’s genocidal threatmaking, let alone the entire war of aggression against Iran. It’s worth sitting with this for a moment, I think; the fact that Alex Jones has expressed more moral concern over a US president’s calls to kill an entire civilization than any major tech executive. (Any tech executive that I have seen, anyway, and I’ve spent the last couple of days looking.) It is occasion to examine the extent to which Silicon Valley has become an enabling partner in Trump’s military adventuring.

Now, the foundational story has been more or less the same since Silicon Valley began its embrace of Trump in earnest last year: The tech giants and largest AI firms made public shows of fealty, embedded themselves in the administration’s broader project and explicitly aligned their interests with Trump’s, in exchange for access to the state’s largesse, deregulatory agenda, and multifaceted support.

But this week should serve as a clarifying moment. The sitting American president explicitly promised a genocide then forced the Iranian people to wait for hours to see if they would be bombed “into the stone age” and the rest of the world to see if he would start World War III in earnest this time. Even a few years ago, Silicon Valley executives might have spoken out against such horrific declarations; intents to, in part, harness their AI, tools and technological infrastructure to such abject ends. Now they are silent; content, apparently, as long as Trump continues to give them favorable land use policy for their data centers and state AI law moratoria. If an industry that rose to cultural dominance by promising to be harbingers of progress—to improve people’s lives, to do no evil, to bring people together, to make a dent in the universe, and by using all of the above as a powerful recruitment tool—cannot draw the line here, then what’s left?

So, today, I want to drill into the myriad ways some of the top AI and tech firms—OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Anthropic—are profiting directly from the US Department of War and their close ties to Trump. Even if all of the tech firms listed above are not explicitly building the technical infrastructure that enables mass killing—though some are—they have become pivotal to Trump’s geopolitical project nonetheless. They have provided his administration financial support, credibility, and lent his project a veneer of forward-looking futurity, even as that project delivers regression, oppression, and violence on the ground. They have provided cloud and AI services to the military and affiliated government agencies. They are war profiteers.

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But on that day in Beit Lahia, something happened, says Yoni (a psyeudonym, as are the names of other interviewees). "Terrorists, terrorists," one soldier shouted. "We go into a frenzy, and I get on the Negev [a machinegun] right away and start spraying, firing hundreds of bullets. We then charged forward, and I realized it was a mistake."

There were no terrorists there. "I saw the bodies of two children, maybe 8 or 10 years old, I have no idea," recalls Yoni. "There was blood everywhere, lots of signs of gunfire, I knew it was all on me, that I did this. I wanted to throw up. After a few minutes, the company commander arrived and said coldly, as if he wasn't a human being, 'They entered an extermination zone, it is their fault, this is what war is like.'"