AI Scammers Are Better at Building Trust Than Humans

Researchers pitted a person against a Claude agent and found that, after a week of texting, the AI chatbot was more effective at creating “exploitable trust” with others.

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From Medusa to Nvidia: On the Algorithm’s Primal Scene

Tracing the “godly, biological, and machinic” origins of contemporary computation

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Data centers take center stage in Wisconsin governor’s race

As the AI buildout spikes energy demand, Democrats and one Republican offer solutions ranging from ramping up clean energy to instituting ratepayer…

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AI Companies Are Pulping Our Humanity

The recent revelation about Anthropic’s systematic digitization and destruction of out-of-print books portends a rapacious future, one where soulless LLMs swell while the shelves starve.

Ed Simon·Aug 3, 2026

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The Conversation

SpaceX aims to use rockets to quickly transport cargo across the Earth and into orbit – moves that would expand the global cargo system

Point-to-point rocket delivery could cut down on transportation times. But engineers will need to figure out how to integrate rockets into current transportation systems.

Koki Ho, Associate Professor of Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology·Aug 5, 2026

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How grief became a subscription service

Two researchers navigate the mind-boggling and often sinister, parallel universe that is known as the digital afterlife industry and chatbots specifically designed to help people grieve.

Russell Belk, Professor, York University, Canada·Aug 4, 2026

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Harper's Magazine

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Weekly Review

At the 2026 AIDS conference, in Rio de Janeiro, U.S. State Department officials mislabeled every country on a map of Africa in a presentation likely generated with artificial intelligence; a Pennsylvania private school where two male students used AI to generate sexually explicit deepfakes of more than 50 female classmates asked a court to dismiss the resulting lawsuit; an OnlyFans model who has been accused of using dating apps to steal from wealthy men was arrested for her connection to the theft of luxury goods at a music festival. The post Weekly Review appeared first on Harper's Magazine.

Harper’s Magazine·Aug 4, 2026