The Future of Addictive Design + Going Deep at DeepMind + HatGPT

Key Takeaways

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  Social media faces a legal crisis over defective design - Recent jury verdicts against Meta and YouTube indicate that platforms can be held liable for features like beauty filters and infinite scroll, bypassing traditional content protections.

  “In LA, a jury found that Meta and YouTube had been negligent in the way that they designed features, that they said were harmful to this plaintiff.”

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  Plaintiffs have found a legal side door around Section 230 - By framing platform mechanics—rather than user-generated content—as defective products, lawyers are successfully challenging the decades-old legal immunity enjoyed by tech companies.

  “This is not about, oh, I got harmed by this particular piece of content. This is about the design of the whole platform. The design feels defective.”

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  Wuhan’s robo-taxi outage highlights autonomous vehicle risks - A glitch in Baidu's self-driving fleet trapped passengers on highways for over an hour, underscoring the physical safety concerns and reliability gaps in current robo-taxi deployments

  “technical glitch that caused a number of robo taxis owned by the Chinese tech giant Baidu to freeze, trapping some passengers in their vehicles for more than an hour.”

Episode Description

Last week, two separate juries held social media companies liable for harming young users. We unpack what these landmark decisions mean — not only for the future of social platforms like Meta and YouTube, but also for A.I. chatbots. Then, Sebastian Mallaby, the author of “The Infinity Machine,” joins us to talk about the three years he spent with Demis Hassabis and those closest to Google DeepMind. And finally, we catch up on some of our favorite tech headlines from the week with a round of HatGPT.   Guest: Sebastian Mallaby, author of “The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for Superintelligence.”   Additional Reading: Juries Take the Lead in the Push for Child Online Safety An A.I. Agent Was Banned From Creating Wikipedia Articles, Then Wrote Angry Blogs About Being Banned I Met Olaf — the Frozen Robot who Might be the Future of Disney Parks Claude’s Code: Anthropic Leaks Source Code for A.I. Software Engineering Tool What’s With All the A.I. Videos of Cheating Fruit? This Company Is Secretly Turning Your Zoom Meetings into A.I. Podcasts North Korean Hackers Suspected in Axios Software Tool Breach   We want to hear from you. Email us at hardfork@nytimes.com. Find “Hard Fork” on YouTube and TikTok. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.