Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery. Today, I’m mulling over whether to upgrade my iPhone 11 Pro. In tech news, there’s a narrative battle afoot in Silicon Valley, tips on avoiding the yearly smartphone upgrade cycle and new devices altogether, and artificial intelligence’s use in government, for better and for worse.
How to see through Silicon Valley’s narrative
The encroachment of technology can feel inevitable. It may have always, but increasingly it’s a perception bolstered by big tech’s own friendly media bubble.
My colleague Nick Robins-Early reports:
If you are looking to hear from some of tech’s most powerful people, you will increasingly find them on a constellation of shows and podcasts like Sourcery that provide a safe space for an industry that is wary, if not openly hostile, towards critical media outlets. Some of the new media outlets are created by the companies themselves. Others just occupy a specific niche that has found a friendly ear among the tech billionaire class like a remora on a fast-moving shark. The heads of tech’s largest companies, including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Satya Nadella and more, have all sat for long, cozy interviews in recent months, while firms like Palantir and Andreessen Horowitz have branched out this year into creating their own media ventures.
At a time when the majority of Americans distrust big tech and believe artificial intelligence will harm society, Silicon Valley has built its own network of alternative media where CEOs, founders and investors are the unchallenged and beloved stars. What was once the province of a few fawning podcasters has grown into a fully fledged ecosystem of publications and shows supported by some of the tech industry’s most powerful.
But at the same time as big tech’s echo chambers are growing louder, so do critical voices from within.
My colleague Varsha Bansal reports on two recent developments. AI raters in the US – a new type of contracted content moderator for artificial intelligence – are telling their friends and family not to use AI. In Seattle, more than 1,000 Amazon corporate workers have anonymously signed an open letter warning the company that its rapid rollout of AI across the company and its products threatens the climate and the livelihoods of its workers.
A dozen AI raters, workers who check an AI’s responses for accuracy and groundedness, told the Guardian that, after becoming aware of the way chatbots and image generators function and just how wrong their output can be, they have begun urging their friends and family not to use generative AI at all – or at least trying to educate their loved ones on using it cautiously. These trainers work on a range of AI models – Google’s Gemini, Elon Musk’s Grok, other popular models, and several smaller or lesser-known bots.
More than 1,000 Amazon employees have signed an open letter expressing “serious concerns” about AI development, saying that the company’s “all-costs justified, warp speed” approach to the powerful technology will cause damage to “democracy, to our jobs, and to the earth”.
The letter, published on Wednesday, was signed by the Amazon workers anonymously, and comes a month after Amazon announced mass layoff plans as it increases adoption of AI in its operations. It contains a range of demands for Amazon, concerning its impact on the workplace and the environment. Staffers are calling on the company to power all its data centers with clean energy and make sure its AI-powered products and services do not enable “violence, surveillance and mass deportation”.
ChatGPT and mental health
How not to buy new tech this holiday season
Black Friday online sales hit $8.6bn in the US, according to Adobe Analytics. You might be one of the buyers. Or you might think, like me, that you can hold on to your sputtering phone, laptop, tablet, etc, one more year, despite the cracked screen or one-hour battery. Replacing them outright with new versions can be prohibitively expensive.
Increasingly, there is another option, though. Devices, even Apple ones, are becoming more repairable. Which means that often, even when your devices are on their last legs, there are cheaper ways to get the tech you need than buying new ones. My colleague Alan Martin reports on refurbished devices and five tips to follow while shopping for them:
Read the description
Refurbished can mean different things. See what condition is promised, paying special attention to battery health. Peer-to-peer buys are a gamble. “Preowned”, “secondhand” and “refurbished” may be used interchangeably, but they mean different things.That separates refurbished marketplaces such as Back Market, MusicMagpie, Refurbed and others from sites where you buy directly from a member of the public, such as Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist.
Check the warranty and returns policy
You want to know that you’re in good hands should anything go wrong.
Research the seller’s reputation
Look at customer reviews and internet feedback. If on eBay, look for sellers in the company’s Refurbished programme.
Research your chosen device
The older the device, the bigger the discount – but this is a false economy if you have to replace it sooner. With phones and laptops, especially, make sure they’re getting updates and will be able to cope with years of use.
Don’t cheap out
A low price is only a bargain if it actually delivers. Prioritise customer service and a transparent refurbishment process over saving a few pounds.
“The best advice I can give for buying refurbished is to go via established retailers such as Back Market, Giffgaff and Vodafone, and if you’re buying through eBay then try to get a device that’s listed as ‘certified refurbished’,” says technology journalist Thomas Deehan, interviewed
Read more: From smash-proof cases to updates: how to make your smartphone last longer
AI in government: incompetent lawyers, automated bureaucracy
Artificial intelligence is proliferating in a wide array of workplaces, including the ones where taxes fund the payroll. The stakes of elections and prison sentences are far higher than the sale of the wrong merchandise by a private company, making AI seem like an ill-advised gamble in government. At the same time, the slogging pace of bureaucracy is a worldwide problem, making AI’s streamlining capabilities appealing. The use of AI in government is still in the early stages. The experiment is yielding mixed results.
First, the good news. Brazil, Germany, and Japan are using generative AI to streamline bureaucracy and make it more participatory. Nathan E Sanders and Bruce Schneier, co-authors of the book Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship, write:
Brazil is notoriously litigious, with even more lawyers per capita than the US. The courts are chronically overwhelmed with cases and the resultant backlog costs the government billions to process.
Since at least 2019, the Brazilian government has aggressively adopted AI to automate procedures throughout its judiciary. AI is not making judicial decisions, but aiding in distributing caseloads, performing legal research, transcribing hearings, identifying duplicative filings, preparing initial orders for signature and clustering similar cases for joint consideration: all things to make the judiciary system work more efficiently. And the results are significant; Brazil’s federal supreme court backlog, for example, dropped in 2025 to its lowest levels in 33 years.
In Germany, With the new tools Wahlweise and Wahl.chat, AI-infused offshoots of the official Wahl-o-Mat how-to-vote quiz, citizens can engage in an interactive conversation with an AI system to more easily get the same information contextualized to their individual interests and questions instead of having to read static webpages about the positions of various political parties.
In Japan, Last year, then 33-year-old engineer Takahiro Anno was a fringe candidate for governor of Tokyo. Running as an independent candidate, he ended up coming in fifth in a crowded field of 56, largely thanks to the unprecedented use of an authorized AI avatar. That avatar answered 8,600 questions from voters on a 17-day continuous YouTube livestream and garnered the attention of campaign innovators worldwide.
Two months ago, Anno-san was elected to Japan’s upper legislative chamber, again leveraging the power of AI to engage constituents – this time answering more than 20,000 questions. His new party, Team Mirai, promises that its members will direct their questioning in committee hearings based on public input in its Mirai Assembly app.
Second, the bad news. In California, government lawyers failed to fact-check the output of generative AI while trying to put a man in prison. My colleague Cecilia Nowell reports on an California prosecutor’s office, which used artificial intelligence to file a motion in at least one criminal case. The motion contained errors known as “hallucinations”:
A prosecutor at the Nevada county district attorney’s office in northern California “recently used artificial intelligence in preparing a filing, which resulted in an inaccurate citation,” district attorney Jesse Wilson said in a statement to the Sacramento Bee. “Once the error was discovered, the filing was immediately withdrawn.”
Defense and civil rights attorneys argue the prosecutor’s office used artificial intelligence in other criminal court filings.
