Technology

On Monday, January 27, 2025, Nvidia lost close to six hundred billion dollars of market value in a single session, the largest one-day loss any company had ever recorded. The cause was not a failed product or a scandal. It was good news about efficiency: a Chinese laboratory, DeepSeek, had published a model that matched the frontier while reporting a fraction of the usual training compute. If intelligence could be had for less hardware, the reasoning went, the world would need less hardware. Within hours Satya Nadella, whose company was spending tens of billions a year on GPUs, had posted a two-word diagnosis with a nineteenth-century name attached: “Jevons paradox strikes again!” …

First, the torch. It burns pine, it smokes, and it never holds still, so the wall never holds still either. The chamber is deep in a limestone cliff above the Ardèche gorge, in the south of France, and the wall bulges and folds like a hide. On it, in charcoal, a pride of lions moves from left to right. Their heads overlap, one behind another, as if the same animal had been caught at several points of a turn. Nearby a horse has too many legs. A bison has eight. …

I pick up the phone to check one thing, the weather or the time of a train. When I look up, forty minutes have passed. Nothing dramatic happened in them. There was a notification, then a video someone had shared, then the next video, then a headline, then a small red number that needed to go away. No single moment felt like a loss of freedom. The hour was made of ordinary moments, and none of them was mine. …

It is late, and a question arrives the way they usually do, sideways, from something half-read: what is the difference between a virus and a viroid? I don’t open a browser with its eleven tabs, or one of the large hosted models. I type the question into a window on my own machine, and a few seconds later an answer appears. A viroid is a bare loop of RNA, no protein coat, no genes for making proteins, a parasite reduced almost to a single gesture. The answer is not brilliant. It is adequate, it is immediate, and it never left the room. …

The public imagination tends to place the danger of artificial intelligence at the far end of the scale: autonomous weapons, a machine that surpasses human intelligence, something with a chassis walking down a street. Those scenarios deserve the attention they get. But the first large social shock is more likely to arrive through a route with no cinematic value at all — the ordinary work already performed inside email, spreadsheets, ticket queues, and the small in-house tools that run a modern office. …

Most people did not enter computing through a single door. Depending on when and where they arrived, there was a console, a command line, a graphical desktop, or several of these at once, layered on top of each other like geological strata. For the ordinary user, the graphical interface was an act of hospitality: it made the machine legible without requiring a vocabulary of commands, paths, flags, and permissions. You pointed, you clicked, the machine answered in pictures. …

Ask any list of the most important pieces of software ever shipped, and four categories always appear: the operating system, email, word processing, and the spreadsheet. Of the four, the spreadsheet is the strangest. It is simultaneously the most empowering tool ever handed to a non-programmer and the largest ungoverned repository of business logic on the planet. VisiCalc, then Lotus 1-2-3, then Excel, did something no compiler or IDE has ever managed: they let a financial analyst, an operations manager, a school administrator encode real domain expertise — pricing models, forecasting logic, inventory rules — without asking anyone’s permission and without writing a single line of what programmers would recognize as code. That is the gift. It is also, by Emerson’s law, exactly where the bill comes due. …

It is tempting to treat techno-accelerationism and technofeudalism as opposites. One says the machine should run faster, further, past every institutional brake; the other says the machine has already been captured, reorganized around rent, extraction, and centralized control. One sounds like the dream of total release. The other sounds like a diagnosis of total domination. But the more interesting possibility is that they are not opposites at all — that they are two projections of the same underlying myth, told from either side of the same platform. …

Picture the same elevator bank across three renovations, spread over fifteen years, though the elevator itself never seems to age: 1943, then 1949, then 1958. Nobody posts a sign explaining which era’s dispatch panel is running behind the doors, and for a stretch, riding it, you genuinely couldn’t tell. That’s the detail worth sitting with. A system that behaves intelligently doesn’t announce what kind of intelligence it has. You only find out what’s inside once it’s wrong, and you watch what it does next. …

Every telling of the dragon myth ends at the same place: the sword goes in, the beast falls, the hero walks out with the treasure and the story stops. But the oldest versions of this myth don’t actually stop there, and the part that keeps going is the part worth reading now. The dragon was rarely a dragon from the beginning. In the sources that predate Wagner’s opera and Tolkien’s paperback, the monster guarding the hoard is a person who got there first — someone who loved the gold enough to kill for it, and who changed shape because of what the gold demanded of him. The sword that ends him doesn’t end the pattern. It just reassigns who gets tempted next. …