The Download

Tricia Crimmins

TL;DR: Protesters in the US popped up outside tech company headquarters, congressional offices, and data center sites this week as part of a movement dubbed “Dump Big Tech.” The demonstrators called for stricter AI regulations, an end to federal Big Tech partnerships, and energy and water usage caps for data centers.

What happened: Though it’s a big-tent movement that brings together many activist groups, all the demonstrations (there have been more than 20 so far) focused on the omni-cause that is AI.

Outside OpenAI’s Washington, DC, lobbying hub on Monday, more than 30 student protesters lambasted the company’s outsized influence on the US government. On the streets surrounding Palantir’s New York City headquarters on Wednesday, approximately 100 people condemned the company for licensing its facial recognition technology to ICE. On Thursday, near Sen. John Fetterman’s Philadelphia office, protesters called for greater regulation around Big Tech companies. And today, groups are demonstrating outside OpenAI’s office in Washington state and the offices of elected officials in Nevada.

Growing discontent: Numerous public opinion polls show that Americans aren’t happy with data centers, and facial recognition technology—from Flock’s cameras to Customs agents using surveillance tech to track their exes—is receiving significant backlash. This week’s protesters cited fear of the government’s Big Brother-esque technological powers.

“We know that Palantir is surveilling a lot of people. […] That’s a big fear, that a lot of our data and our identities [will] be tracked,” Jennifer, one of the protesters in NYC who declined to share her last name over safety concerns, told Tech Brew. “People are also seeing the ways in which their [electric] bills are going up, the way in which data centers keep popping up in our communities. None of this is actually helping us. It’s actually hurting us, making our bills higher, and then just making us feel unsafe.”

Alternative future: Rather than using AI for “evil,” as some protesters chanted outside Google’s NYC offices on Wednesday, a number of rallies imagined a world in which AI could “protect and take care” of humans.

“This technology should be used to make our lives better,” NYC Assemblymember Claire Valdez said at the rally outside Palantir’s office. “It should be used to shorten our working hours. It should be used to make our productivity actually pay us more. It should be used to tackle the real emergencies that we are facing right now, like climate change.”

Bottom line: AI will be on trial during the midterm elections in November, and both sides are gearing up for a fight. As Big Tech increases its political donations, grassroots movements aim to oust elected officials who accept Big Tech bucks. —TC

      

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Have AI interview you then recommend use cases

If you’re not sure exactly where to start with AI chatbots—or think they could be helping you with more but aren’t sure how—a good place to start is to have one interview you about your life and work. From there, it can identify tasks it can automate or help you with.

Here’s the prompt:

Given you know AI’s capabilities better than I do, help me identify where I could be using it more. To do this, please interview me about my work, life, goals, responsibilities, routines, and frustrations one question at a time. Use each answer to decide what to ask next, and look out for repetitive, time-consuming, mentally draining, or research-heavy tasks.

Keep going until you have enough context to give me five personalized recommendations that are feasible, including at least two ideas I probably wouldn’t have thought of. For each, briefly explain why it fits me and how to get started, with an example prompt where useful. Prioritize ideas that could save me the most time, effort, money, or mental load.

Just answering the questions can be a useful exercise to get a sense of your bottlenecks. And if you don’t like the initial recommendations, you can always go back and forth until you have one or two you want to try. —SM

Have a question about using AI—for work, life, or anything in between? Let us know. Nothing is too basic or too ambitious.

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The Zeitbyte

The new tech shortage: therapists

Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photo: Adobe Stock

In case it wasn’t already obvious, we regret to inform you that Silicon Valley tech workers are not doing OK—at least, so say their therapists in a recent Business Insider report. Amid a year of brutal layoffs, the engineers and PMs who locked down some of the industry’s most coveted roles are rethinking their careers (like, say, a pivot to the FBI, or becoming a stay-at-home dad). Some feel complicit in developing the tech that’s replacing people’s jobs. And the big, fortune-making IPOs that they thought would bring bliss don’t quite hit the way they expected. (Which, again, makes them feel guilty, or depressed.)

Mental health professionals note that these techies are also just working too much—which they cope with in a range of ways, from “probably inadvisable” to “potentially life-altering.” This includes doomscrolling, “serial angel investing,” having an affair, and ayahuasca trips. One psychotherapist even argued that work is “the most socially acceptable addiction.” But a lot of tech workers are apparently looking to fix their sending-emails-at-midnight habit—the waiting list to book a session with this particular therapist is currently between six and 12 months long. —WK

Chaos Brewing Meter: ☕/5

• Did you get a push notification from Apple about spyware? That wasn’t a mistake (and you should take immediate action).
• There’s now a Part 2 and Part 3 to The Odyssey spoof videos we wrote about last week—and they’re just as hilariously unhinged.
• If you’re not at all worried about ChatGPT watching everything you do on your Mac, you can now turn that feature on so it can complete tasks for you.
• At this point, Cards Against Humanity should just rename itself to Cards Against Elon Musk.
• You can now see the source code behind the For You feed on X, and even check whether you’ve been shadowbanned.
• There may be a powerful new way to block AI scrapers on the web: a font that scrambles text so every sentence reads like Mad Libs—but only for bots.
• Pour one out for this local PBS station, which is at risk of losing over 70 years of archival footage and programming due to its cloud storage provider abruptly going out of business.

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