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John Naughton

John Naughton

The Guardian

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Trump may smell money in saving TikTok, but there’s a whiff of platform power too

Trump may smell money in saving TikTok, but there’s a whiff of platform power too
25.01.2025 6

The Guardian

John Naughton

Cringing before the tech giants is no way to make Britain an AI superpower

19.01.2025 10

The Guardian

John Naughton

With his toxic revamp, Emperor Zuckerberg is preparing to be Trump’s puppet

18.01.2025 3

The Guardian

John Naughton

Note to No 10: one speed doesn’t fit all when it comes to online safety

12.01.2025 10

The Guardian

John Naughton

Memo to Trump: US telecoms is vulnerable to hackers. Please hang up and try again

You know the drill. You’re logging into your bank or another service (Gmail, to name just one) that you use regularly. You enter your username and...

04.01.2025 4

The Guardian

John Naughton

How will AI reshape 2025? Well, it could be the spreadsheet of the 21st century

If 2024 was the year of large language models (LLMs), then 2025 looks like the year of AI “agents”. These are quasi-intelligent systems that...

28.12.2024 2

The Guardian

John Naughton

If AI can provide a better diagnosis than a doctor, what’s the prognosis for medics?

AI means too many (different) things to too many people. We need better ways of talking – and thinking – about it. Cue, Drew Breunig, a gifted geek...

30.11.2024 7

The Guardian

John Naughton

The images of Spain’s floods weren’t created by AI. The trouble is, people think they were

My eye was caught by a striking photograph in the most recent edition of Charles Arthur’s Substack newsletter Social Warming. It shows a narrow...

09.11.2024 4

The Guardian

John Naughton

Better, faster, stronger? Tech titans’ obsession with turbocharged computer power could be our downfall

In 2001 I interviewed the late Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel. He was in Cambridge to attend the opening of a new library that he and his...

02.11.2024 2

The Guardian

John Naughton

Our perverse respect for immense wealth allows Musk and Zuckerberg to run riot

There are two kinds of aphrodisiac. The first is power. A good example was provided by the late Henry Kissinger, who could hardly be described as...

26.10.2024 2

The Guardian

John Naughton

The podcast Kill List doesn’t reflect badly on the internet – it reflects badly on us

This column comes to you as a break from listening to a riveting podcast series called Kill List . It’s about a secret website that journalist and...

19.10.2024 7

The Guardian

John Naughton

Nobel winner Geoffrey Hinton is the ‘godfather of AI’. Here’s an offer he shouldn’t refuse…

Way back in 2011 Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist with aspirations to be a public intellectual, published an essay entitled “Why Software Is...

12.10.2024 1

The Guardian

John Naughton

The blogosphere is in full bloom. The rest of the internet has wilted

If you log into Dave Winer’s blog, Scripting News, you’ll find a constantly updated note telling you how many years, months, days, hours, minutes...

05.10.2024 2

The Guardian

John Naughton

It’s useful that the latest AI can ‘think’, but we need to know its reasoning

It’s nearly two years since OpenAI released ChatGPT on an unsuspecting world, and the world, closely followed by the stock market, lost its mind....

28.09.2024 10

The Guardian

John Naughton

Thanks to Donald Trump, Apple’s new AirPods will make America hear again

Like many professional scribblers, I sometimes have to write not in a hushed study or library, but in noisy environments. So years ago I bought a...

21.09.2024 20

The Guardian

John Naughton

By showing Musk’s X the red card, has Brazil scored a goal for all democracies?

At 10 minutes past midnight on 31 August, Elon Musk’s X (nee Twitter) went dark in Brazil, a country of more than 200 million souls, many of them...

15.09.2024 3

The Guardian

John Naughton

Telegram chief’s arrest sends a clear message: tech titans are not above the law

On 24 August, a Russian tech billionaire’s private jet landed at Le Bourget airport, north-east of Paris, to find that officers of the French...

07.09.2024 20

The Guardian

John Naughton

Can you judge the tech bros by their bookshelves?

In August, a thoughtful blogger, Tanner Greer, posed an interesting question to the Silicon Valley crowd: “What are the contents of the ‘vague tech...

31.08.2024 3

The Guardian

John Naughton

What opposition to delivery drones shows about big tech’s disrespect for democracy

Scratch a digital capitalist and you’ll find a technological determinist – someone who believes that technology drives history. These people see...

10.08.2024 2

The Guardian

John Naughton

Silicon Valley’s Trump supporters are dicing with the death of democracy

In How Democracy Ends , his elegant book published after Trump’s election in 2016, David Runciman made a startling point. It was that while the...

03.08.2024 4

The Guardian

John Naughton

My new iPhone symbolises stagnation, not innovation – and a similar fate awaits AI

I bought an iPhone 15 the other day to replace my five-year-old iPhone 11. The phone is powered by the new A17 Pro chip and has a terabyte of data...

27.07.2024 2

The Guardian

John Naughton

Google’s wrong answer to the threat of AI – stop indexing content

Once upon a time, a very long time ago in internet years – 1998 – Google was truly great. A couple of lads at Stanford University in California had...

20.07.2024 30

The Guardian

John Naughton