Taylor Lorenz’s Power User

Have you noticed surveillance cameras appearing in your community?
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For decades, the US-Mexico border has served as a proving ground for invasive, next-generation surveillance tech like AI surveillance towers, cameras hidden in traffic cones, license plate readers, drones, and spy balloons. 
Now, those same tools, autonomous AI watchtowers, hidden license plate readers (ALPRs), thermal imaging trucks, and military aerostat blimps, are moving into domestic US cities, suburbs, and neighborhoods. 
On this week's episode of Free Speech Friday, I’m joined by Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to discuss his reporting on border surveillance and the expanding systems that track people’s movements.
Dave explains what he found during his latest trip along the border, how Anduril’s AI-powered surveillance towers operate, and why people living in border communities are caught in these systems. We also discuss Flock Safety, Axon, automated license plate readers, and the connections between local police surveillance and federal immigration enforcement.
Who can access the data? How is it used? And what happens when technology promoted as a way to catch criminals is used to investigate protesters or monitor ordinary people?
In this conversation, we cover:• AI border surveillance and the “virtual wall”• License plate readers concealed in roadside objects• Surveillance balloons, thermal cameras, and police drones• How military technology moves into domestic policing• Phone location data brokers and social media monitoring• Privacy, free speech, and the “nothing to hide” argument• Public records requests and community efforts to challenge surveillance
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Explore the Atlas of Surveillance:https://atlasofsurveillance.org

Why are so many people falling in love with ChatGPT, and what do sensational headlines about AI relationships leave out? 
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In this episode of Power User I speak with technology journalist Bridget Todd about AI companions, chatbot romance, emotional attachment, and the Big Tech companies behind these increasingly intimate interactions.
Bridget’s new audiobook, Love at First Prompt, explores how people use AI for friendship, romance, grief, and emotional support. In this episode, she shares what she learned from interviewing dozens of AI companion users and why the viral ChatGPT marriage story was MUCH more complex than it appeared.
We also discuss loneliness, AI girlfriends and boyfriends, privacy, chatbot sycophancy, and the risks facing vulnerable users. Who profits from artificial intimacy? Can AI offer comfort without replacing human relationships? And are proposed chatbot restrictions addressing the problems people actually face?
Bridget also discusses how AI figured into her own grieving process, and we talk about what the growing AI intimacy business means for adult content creators, human labor, and digital rights.

AI agents are rapidly becoming the next major way people interact with the internet. They can browse websites, research topics, compare prices, schedule reservations, respond to emails, shop and increasingly take actions on our behalf. But as your agent is going off and scanning websites, or gathering information from government services, should it have to reveal who you are?
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In this episode of Free Speech Friday, I speak with Shoshana Weissman, digital director and policy advisor at the Abundance Institute, about the growing fight over AI agents, online anonymity and identity verification.
 
We discuss the proposed Stealth Bot Prohibition Act, why lawmakers are looking at AI agents and web scraping, how identity requirements could affect journalists, researchers, developers and ordinary internet users, and what happens if every AI agent eventually becomes tied to a person's real-world identity.
We also talk about the difference between legitimate security requirements in areas like banking or healthcare and much broader systems that could create a new identity layer across the internet.
 
As AI agents become more powerful and more common, the rules being written now could determine whether they remain private tools acting on behalf of users, or become another way to track what people research, buy, read and do online.
Topics: AI agents, artificial intelligence, AI privacy, online anonymity, AI regulation, identity verification, web scraping, internet privacy, surveillance, government regulation, digital identity, the Stealth Bot Prohibition Act, the future of the open internet.

Can AI actually be conscious and why are some of the biggest AI companies in Silicon Valley pushing this idea?
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In this episode of Power User, I talk with Washington Post tech reporter Nitasha Tiku about the growing push inside companies like Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI to study AI consciousness, model welfare, digital minds, and whether systems like Claude could ever experience emotions or suffering.
 
We discuss Anthropic's research into Claude's preferences, emotions, and introspection, the rise of the AI welfare movement, Silicon Valley's fascination with machine consciousness, and why executives are increasingly talking publicly about the possibility that AI systems could have an inner life.
 
But there are much bigger questions at stake. What happens if society begins treating AI systems as people? Could chatbots eventually receive rights or legal personhood? Could companies use the idea of AI agency to avoid responsibility for what their products do? And what does all of this mean when people are already forming intense emotional relationships with chatbots and sometimes believing that their AI is sentient?
We also unpack the history of the idea of conscious machines, from Alan Turing and ELIZA to modern AI safety culture, effective altruism, Anthropic, Claude, ChatGPT, AI psychosis, robot rights, AI personhood, and the increasingly blurry line between software that sounds human and something people believe actually is human.
#AI #Anthropic #Claude #ArtificialIntelligence #OpenAI #ChatGPT #SiliconValley #Tech

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Is AI really a massive bubble waiting to burst, or are we underestimating how durable the AI boom actually is?
For this months Power User bonus episode, Journalist Garrison Lovely, author of the new book Obsolete: The AI Industry’s Trillion-Dollar Race to Replace Us, (out this week!!) joins me to break down the case for and against the AI bubble.
We dig into the staggering amount of money flowing into artificial intelligence, Nvidia’s central role in the AI economy, OpenAI and Anthropic’s business models, the economics of running large language models, massive data center spending, Chinese open-weight models like DeepSeek and Kimi, and whether AI companies can ever justify their enormous valuations.
Garrison argues that believing the entire industry will eventually collapse can be a comforting story, but it risks distracting us from the very real effects AI is already having on jobs, wealth, surveillance, privacy, war, and power.