Disgraced founder of fraudulent blood-testing company Theranos is expected to enter prison on Thursday

Elizabeth Holmes will find herself behind the walls of a Texas prison on Tuesday, in a remarkable fall for a startup founder who had become an icon known far outside Silicon Valley.

Holmes, 39, had once promised to revolutionize the medical world, but was convicted in January 2022 on four counts of defrauding investors in her blood testing company, Theranos.

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The leading intellect on digital culture believes the recent tech reckoning is corrective justice for Silicon Valley barons

It was a tough week in tech.

The top US health official warned about the risks of social media to young people; tech billionaire Elon Musk further trashed his reputation with the disastrous Twitter launch of a presidential campaign; and senior executives at OpenAI, makers of ChatGPT, called for the urgent regulation of “super intelligence”.

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The controversial author on the importance of updating his landmark book on animal liberation, being ‘flexibly vegan’ and the ethical dangers of artificial intelligence for the non-human world

Australian philosopher Peter Singer ’s book Animal Liberation , published in 1975, exposed the realities of life for animals in factory farms and testing laboratories and provided a powerful moral basis for rethinking our relationship to them. Now, nearly 50 years on, Singer, 76, has a revised version titled Animal Liberation Now . It comes on the heels of an updated edition of his popular Ethics in the Real World , a collection of short essays dissecting important current events, first published in 2016. Singer, a utilitarian , is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University. In addition to his work on animal ethics, he is also regarded as the philosophical originator of a philanthropic social movement known as effective altruism , which argues for weighing up causes to achieve the most good. He is considered one of the world’s most influential – and controversial – philosophers.

Why write Animal Liberation Now ?
The last full update was 1990. Though the philosophical arguments have stood up well, the chapters that describe factory farming and what we do to animals in labs needed to be almost completely rewritten. I also hadn’t really discussed factory farming’s contribution to the climate crisis and I wanted to reflect on our progress towards animal rights . Effectively, this is a new book for the next generation, hence the new title.

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Readers respond to Naomi Klein’s article that argued it is delusional to believe AI machines will benefit humanity

Naomi Klein’s article about the dangers of generative AI makes many valid points about the economic and social consequences of the new technology ( AI machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are, 8 May ). But her choice of language about how to describe the mistakes that the new AI makes seems to suggest she is committed mainly to providing an ideological interpretation of the new technology.

Saying that mistakes are the results of glitches in the code rather than the tech hallucinating suggests the simulation is a simple one, involving a kind of power of the false rather than a more complex one that allows the possibility of some form of fabulation. This is important because it means that the technology can’t be seen simply as a control technology, like nuclear fusion or self-driving cars, but instead indicates a switch to an adaptive form of technology, ie, ones that are based on adapting what is already out there rather than trying to reinvent what exists, as in some form of innovation.

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In his hotly anticipated 700-page book, Palo Alto, the writer and activist examines a dark history through the lens of his hometown

In January 2011, a 19-year-old in Palo Alto died by suicide on the train tracks running through town, part of a disturbing, decade-long pattern of deaths of despair in the wealthy heart of Silicon Valley. The same week, a 19-year-old Chinese worker at Foxconn, the company that built iPhones, also died by suicide, part of a series of deaths among young people working on the grueling assembly lines at one of China’s most famous tech manufacturers.

Palo Alto, a new book by the American author Malcolm Harris, attempts to understand the connection between these patterns of suicide at two different hubs of the global tech economy. To do so, Harris digs deeply into the history of Palo Alto, the home of Stanford University and the town where he grew up. As a teenager coming of age in the early 2000s, he saw the town’s international influence grow along with the tech companies headquartered around it, and the number of suicides among his classmates.

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Tables may have freed up at Silicon Valley’s Coupa Cafe, but ‘scalability’ is still on the menu as tech workers look forward

If you read the news , you’d think that San Francisco is dead. If you try to drive there during rush hour, you’d find that hard to believe.

On a sunny Wednesday morning this month, I found myself on the Bay Bridge, en route to inspect the alleged demise of San Francisco and the reports that Silicon Valley’s golden age is coming to a halt.

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