The Download: smart glasses in 2025, and China’s AI scene
“While we encourage people to use AI systems during their role to help them work faster and more effectively, please do not use AI assistants during the application process.”
—AI company Anthropic urges people applying to work there not to use chatbots and other tools during the process, the Financial Times reports.
The big story
The race to save our online lives from a digital dark age
August 2024
There is a photo of my daughter that I love. She is sitting, smiling, in our old back garden, chubby hands grabbing at the cool grass. It was taken on a digital camera in 2013, when she was almost one, but now lives on Google Photos.
But what if, one day, Google ceased to function? What if I lost my treasured photos forever? For many archivists, alarm bells are ringing. Across the world, they are scraping up defunct websites or at-risk data collections to save as much of our digital lives as possible. Others are working on ways to store that data in formats that will last hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of years.
The endeavor raises complex questions. What is important to us? How and why do we decide what to keep—and what do we let go? And how will future generations make sense of what we’re able to save? Read the full story.
—Niall Firth
