Failures and Controversies in Augmented Reality and Tech Leadership

Greetings from Read Max HQ! Today’s post is a Read Max audiovisual product featuring cohost Sam Biddle, senior technology reporter at The Intercept.

A quick interstitial reminder: Read Max is a subscription business! In order to devote the time I do every week to reading, writing, reporting, thinking, procrastinating, and all other activities essential to the production of this twice-and-sometimes-thrice-weekly newsletter, I need to “convert” readers into “paid subscribers,” a task I attempt to accomplish with these touts. If you find what I do valuable to you--if you think you learn something, or are entertained, or get mad in a productive way--please consider compensating me for that value for the unbelievably low price of $5 a month. Think of it like buying me a beer once a month in exchange for something like 20,000 almost entirely properly spelled and punctuated words of insight, argument, criticism, good sci-fi recommendations, and sometimes even humor.

Yesterday Sam and I “went live” to talk about a set of new stories on tech’s ever-increasing ties to the defense industry:

* A recent white paper from OpenAI outlining the company’s vision of A.I.’s geopolitical future, about which Sam wrote more here;

* Mark Zuckerberg and Palmer Luckey burying the hatchet and partnering on a V.R. headset for the military; and

* Palantir's controversial new role counting human beings for the U.S. government.

What do these partnerships tell us about the present and future of the tech industry, A.I., and geopolitics?

Also up for discussion: What’s going on at Apple? And two distinctly unsettling photographs, the first of Luckey and Zuckerberg breaking bread…

…and the second, a sort of wedding-announcement pic of former Apple designer Jony Ive and OpenAI C.E.O. Sam Altman:

Please enjoy, here on Substack, or, without video, on any of your preferred podcast platforms!