Trump’s New Big Tech Era, TSMC’s Shift, and the A.I. Conferences Steering 2026
It’s Monday, December 1st. I’m not a turkey guy, and I’m of the opinion that we’ve all made a terrible habit of subjecting ourselves to the one and only time anyone cooks the damn thing each year. So I hope you had an excellent alternative protein in addition to that one. Ours was the Nobu miso-marinated black cod. Unreal.Okay, after the food comes the A.I. hangover. This week I’m looking at three fronts where the future of technology just lurched in a very particular direction: politics, geopolitics, and the weird church council that is the A.I. conference circuit.First, the politics. Trump’s leaked executive order to wipe out state A.I. laws seems to have stalled — not because he’s suddenly discovered restraint, but maybe because the polling suggests that killing A.I. regulation is radioactive. Instead, the effort is being shoved into Congress via the National Defense Authorization Act, the “must-pass” budget bill where bad ideas go to hide. Pair that with the Federal Trade Commission getting its teeth kicked in by Meta in court, and you can feel the end of the Biden-era regulatory moment and the start of a very different chapter: a government that treats Big Tech less as something to govern and more as something to protect.Second, the geopolitics. TSMC’s CEO is now openly talking about expanding chip manufacturing outside Taiwan. That sounds like a business strategy, but it’s really a tectonic shift. For years, America’s commitment to Taiwan has been tied directly to that island’s role as our chip lifeline. If TSMC starts building more of that capacity in Arizona and elsewhere, the risk calculus around a Chinese move on Taiwan changes — and so does the fragility of the supply chain that A.I. sits on top of.Finally, the quiet councils of the faithful: AWS re:Invent and NeurIPS. Amazon is under pressure to prove that all this spending on compute actually makes money. NeurIPS, meanwhile, is where the people who build the models go to decide what counts as progress: more efficient inference, new architectures, new “alignment” tricks. A single talk or paper at that conference can set the tone for years of insanely expensive work. So between Trump’s maneuvers, the FTC’s loss, TSMC’s hedging, and the A.I. priesthood gathering in one place, the past week and this one are a pretty good snapshot of who really steers the current we’re all in.
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15:24
AI Distortion Is Here — And It’s Already Warping Us All
It’s a warning siren: people seeing delusions they never knew they had amplified by AI, a wave of lawsuits alleging emotional manipulation and even suicide coaching, a major company banning minors from talking freely with chatbots for fear of excessive attachment, and a top mental-health safety expert at OpenAI quietly heading for the exit.For years I’ve argued that AI would distort our thinking the same way GPS distorted our sense of direction. But I didn’t grasp how severe that distortion could get—how quickly it would slide from harmless late-night confiding to full-blown psychosis in some users.OpenAI’s own data suggests millions of people each week show signs of suicidal ideation, emotional dependence, mania, or delusion inside their chats. Independent investigations and a growing legal record back that up. And all of this is happening while companies roll out “AI therapists” and push the fantasy that synthetic friends might be good for us.As with most of what I’ve covered over the years, this isn’t a tech story. It’s a psychological one. A biological one. And a story about mixed incentives. A story about ancient circuitry overwhelmed by software, and by the companies who can’t help but market it as sentient. I’m calling it AI Distortion—a spectrum running from mild misunderstanding all the way to dependency, delusion, isolation, and crisis.It’s becoming clear that we’re not just dealing with a tool that organizes our thoughts. We’re dealing with a system that can warp them, in all of us, every time.
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11:49
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11:49
Insurers Are Backing Away From A.I.—and That Should Scare You More Than Any Sci-Fi Predictions
Today I dug into the one corner of the economy that’s supposed to keep its head when everyone else is drunk on hype: the insurance industry. Three of the biggest carriers in the country—AIG, Great American, and W.R. Berkley—are now begging regulators not to force them to cover A.I.-related losses, according to the Financial Times. These are the people who price hurricanes, wildfires, and war zones… and they look at A.I. and say, “No thanks.” That tells you something about where we really are in the cycle.I also walked through the Trump administration’s latest maneuver, which looks a lot like carrying water for Big Tech in Brussels: trading lower steel tariffs for weaker European tech rules. (The Europeans said “no thank you.”) Meanwhile, we’re still waiting on the rumored executive order that would bulldoze state A.I. laws—the only guardrails we have in this country.On the infrastructure front, reporting out of Mumbai shows how A.I. demand is forcing cities back toward coal just to keep data centers running. And if that wasn’t dystopian enough, I close with a bleak little nugget from Business Insider advising Gen Z to “focus on tasks, not job titles” in the A.I. economy. Translation: don’t expect a career—expect a series of gigs glued together by hope.It’s a full Monday’s worth of contradictions: the fragile hype economy, the political favoritism behind it, and the physical reality—pollution, burnout, precarity—that always shows up eventually.
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9:18
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9:18
The Executive Order That Would End AI Regulation in America
The only laws protecting you from the worst excesses of A.I. might be wiped out — and fast. A leaked Trump executive order would ban states from regulating A.I. at all, rolling over the only meaningful protections any of us currently have. There is no federal A.I. law, no federal data-privacy law, nothing. States like California, Illinois, and Colorado are the only line of defense against discriminatory algorithms, unsafe model deployment, and the use of A.I. as a quasi-therapist for millions of vulnerable people.This isn’t just bad policy — it’s wildly unpopular. The last time Republicans tried this maneuver, the Senate killed it 99–1. And Americans across the political spectrum overwhelmingly want A.I. regulated, even if it slows the industry down. But the tech sector wants a frictionless, regulation-free environment, and the Trump administration seems eager to give it to them — from crypto dinners and gilded ballrooms to billion-dollar Saudi co-investment plans.There’s another layer here: state laws also slow down the federal government’s attempt to build a massive surveillance apparatus using private data brokers and companies like Palantir. State privacy protections cut off that flow of data. Removing those laws clears the pipe.The White House argues this is about national security, China, and “woke A.I.” But legal experts say the order is a misreading of commerce authority and won’t survive in court. And state leaders like California’s Scott Wiener are already preparing to sue. For now, the takeaway is simple: states are the only governments in America protecting you from A.I. — and the administration is trying to take that away.
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8:26
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8:26
When AI Stops Being About Jobs — and Starts Being About Us
In today’s episode, I’m following the money, the infrastructure, and the politics:Nvidia just posted another monster quarter and showed that it’s still the caffeine in the US economy. Investors briefly relaxed, even as they warned that an AI bubble is still the top fear in markets. Google jammed Gemini 3 deeper into Search in a bid to regain narrative control. Cloudflare broke down and reminded us that the “smart” future still runs on pretty fragile plumbing. The EU blinked on AI regulation. And here in the U.S., the White House rolled out the red carpet for Saudi Arabia as part of a multibillion-dollar AI infrastructure deal that seems to be shiny enough to have President Trump openly chastising a journalist for asking Crown Prince about his personal responsibility for the murder of an American journalist.But the deeper story I’m looking at today is social, not financial. Politicians like Bernie Sanders are beginning to voice the fear that AI won’t just destroy jobs — it might quietly corrode our ability to relate to one another. If you’ve been following me you know this is more or less all I’m thinking about at the moment. So I looked at the history of this kind of concern, and while we’re generally only concerned with death and financial loss in this country, we do snap awake from time to time when a new technology threatens our social fabric. Roll your eyes if you want to, but we’ve seen this moment before with telegraphs, movies, radio demagogues, television, video games, and social media, and there’s a lot to learn from that history. This episode explores that lineage, what it means for AI, and why regulation might arrive faster than companies expect.
The Rip Current covers the big, invisible forces carrying us out to sea, from tech to politics to greed to beauty to culture to human weirdness. The currents are strong, but with a little practice we can learn to spot them from the beach, and get across them safely.
Veteran journalist Jacob Ward has covered technology, science and business for NBC News, CNN, PBS, and Al Jazeera. He's written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, and is the former Editor in Chief of Popular Science magazine.
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