AI Is Dehumanizing the Internet

The rise of AI has brought massive changes to the internet, a slow process that began at least 20 years ago.

Recent developments show that this transformation is accelerating and will likely lead to the full dehumanization of the internet, leaving us disempowered, easily manipulable, and entirely dependent on companies that provide AI services.

In this edition of the newsletter, I explain the AI-powered dehumanization process, how it impacts us, and some of its ethical and legal implications.

While the comparison with DeepSeek might make sense from marketing and geopolitical standpoints, it is important to remember that these are two different AI applications with different strategies and functionalities:

• DeepSeek-R1 is an open-source, general-purpose AI model designed to rival OpenAI’s o1;
• Manus AI is a general AI agent currently in closed beta testing. It requires an invitation to access and is not entirely open-source;
• Manus AI hasn’t triggered a significant stock drop like the one Nvidia saw after DeepSeek.

AI Policy, Compliance & Regulation

In 2024, with the enactment of the EU AI Act, the release of numerous AI governance frameworks, and the launch of new professional certifications, we saw a surge in AI governance professionals entering the workforce, particularly in the U.S. and Europe.

But what exactly is an AI governance professional, and what kinds of jobs could fit this definition?

Many people assume that being an AI governance professional requires a legal degree. This is a misconception. AI governance, from a professional perspective, is an umbrella term encompassing various fields, skills, and areas of expertise.

According to the EU AI Act, the human responsible for oversight measures must be able to understand how the AI system operates and interpret its outputs, intervening when necessary to prevent harm to fundamental rights.

But if AI systems are highly complex and function like black box—operating in an opaque manner—how are humans supposed to have a detailed comprehension of their functioning and reasoning to oversee them properly?

If we accept that humans often won’t fully grasp an AI system’s decision-making, can they decide whether harm to fundamental rights has occurred? And if not, can human oversight truly be effective?

Emerging AI Governance Challenges | Paid Subscriber Edition | #173

This week, Microsoft announced Majorana 1, a quantum chip powered by a new “topological core architecture.” According to Microsoft, this quantum breakthrough will help solve industrial-scale problems in just a few years rather than decades.

From a more technical perspective, the topoconductor (or topological superconductor) is a special category of material that creates a new state of matter: it’s neither solid, liquid, nor gas, but a “topological state.”
(*I highly recommend watching this 12-minute video released by Microsoft to learn more about the science behind it. If you have science-loving kids at home, make sure to watch it with them!)

For those interested in diving deeper into the technical details of Microsoft’s latest announcement, the researchers involved have also published a paper in Nature and a “roadmap to fault-tolerant quantum computation using topological qubit arrays,” which can be found here.