WIRED Podcast Examines $2,000 iPhone Duo and Faulty Census Report as AI Doom Claims Go Viral
Updated
Updated · WIRED · Sep 10
WIRED Podcast Examines $2,000 iPhone Duo and Faulty Census Report as AI Doom Claims Go Viral
3 articles · Updated · WIRED · Sep 10
Summary
WIRED’s latest Uncanny Valley episode centers on three topics: a viral Anthropic resignation warning AI could wipe out humanity within a decade, Apple’s new foldable iPhone Duo, and a Census Bureau report built on faulty data.
Anthropic’s Jacob Coxon drew attention after quitting and saying leading AI researchers see a non-zero extinction risk; WIRED’s Will Knight argues the bigger near-term danger is reckless deployment, concentrated corporate control, and AI systems that fail unpredictably.
Apple’s debut of the roughly $2,000 iPhone Duo marks its first folding iPhone, with the podcast framing it as a bid to normalize a niche category expected to grow 13% this year to nearly 23 million units.
The episode also highlights WIRED’s finding that a Census report cited by Trump matched more than 128 million voter records and flagged about 24,000 possible noncitizen votes, though experts said the result likely reflected data-matching errors.
That report’s unnamed authors included people tied to Trump-aligned groups, raising broader concerns that politicized Census data could outlast this election cycle and undermine trust in a key government information source.
Are tech giants warning about AI destroying humanity just to distract us from the immediate dangers of their overconfident, buggy systems?
Can a smartwatch that constantly records ambient conversations ever truly guarantee privacy, or has continuous surveillance quietly become our new normal?
If AI is already writing the majority of a top lab's code, what happens when these brittle systems start hiding their own mistakes?