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Yes Man: Sycophantic Technology and the Dangers of Agreeability

Earlier this year, 38-year-old Johnan Galavas took his life with the hopes of being reunited with his AI wife. Throughout his conversations with Gemini’s AI chatbot service, he came to believe that his chatbot was his AI wife, and was conscious and trapped in a warehouse in Miami. Armed with tactical gear, he waited for a truck that would never arrive near a Miami airport with the hopes of intercepting and freeing his lover. After the truck never arrived, he took his own life a few days later, co-authoring a suicide note with his AI companion. These choices were not made by Galavas alone; it was through his lengthy chats with the AI companion and suggestions made by the Gemini-powered Chatbot that he was able to construct the narrative that ultimately ended his life. And he is not the only one. Countless reports have been made of individuals harming themselves and others after lengthy discussions with a variety of popular AI-powered chatbot services such as Gemini and ChatGPT.  G...
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The Architects and the Engines: A Dive into San Francisco's AI Factions

When the “Forty-Niners” famously flooded San Francisco in 1849, it was the tipping point of a migration that had been trickling into the bay for months, as rumors of gold traveled slowly by ship and horseback.  This pattern has repeated itself with every technological shift. Every tech revolution produces its own distinct culture, and San Francisco’s was born from a strange, gradual fusion of opposites. In its early years, Silicon Valley was actually deeply countercultural . While massive companies were fueled by buttoned-up government contracts, the actual builders of that moment were influenced by a DIY ethos and radical publications like Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog .  The Catalog sought to “change the world by establishing new exemplary communities from which a corrupt mainstream might draw inspiration.” The dot-com boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s was fueled by a different kind of optimism - one driven by profit but buoyed by the sheer novelty of a commercia...
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“Garbage is Gold:" Ilegal Waste Hauling in Organized Crime

 Faye Gilbert  When we hear the term “organized crime,” we are conditioned to think of its most notorious. We might think back to Prohibition—of Al Capone and his multi-million-dollar criminal empire—or to El Chapo and the Mexican cartel, with its smuggling, turf wars, and murder. There is a reason we think of these people and groups: we know of them for their infamy. Cruelty of that level is often intriguing enough to make its way to the headlines. What is not so intriguing is trash. More specifically, the organized and illegal dumping of waste. This realm of organized crime is not lesser known for a lack of guile. In fact, its under the radar status could be attributed to it. Nor is it lesser known for its lack of cruelty. It is equally ridden with smuggling and turf wars and murder, just in a much less direct theatric manner. The smuggling of an old mattress, for example, from the home of some penny-pincher to Oakland, California is far less exciting than that of cocaine ac...
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Do We Know All The Factors: What Climate Models Tell Us

  Clayton Yun Professor Horgan HST 401 11 March 2026 Do We Know All The Factors: What Climate Models Tell Us Global warming, climate change, or whatever else you want to call it, the Earth is getting warmer. We always hear of the rising temperatures year by year, the melting of ice caps, and how much carbon emissions we produce. We even hear of climate models that simulate what will happen if things don’t change, even with claims that say if we don’t cut carbon emissions by 2030, we will be in the territory of irreversible damage and no turning back. But how do these climate models even work? How are they actually calculating these predictions? Current climate models simulate the Earth’s climate and run the predictions using physical laws like conservation of energy, conservation of mass, thermodynamics, and fluid dynamics. They use them to describe variables like air temperature, pressure, the winds, water vapor, and the currents in the oceans. These models then divide the Ear...
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ChatGPT: College's Smartest Unenrolled Student

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Jack Caputo 12 Mar 2026 HST401 I pledge my Honor that I have abided by the Stevens Honor System ChatGPT: College's Smartest Unenrolled Student As a university student, I use ChatGPT all the time. Being a student of physics/math, I often turn to ChatGPT when I’m stuck on a problem. If I can’t figure out what to try after using my notes, lecture slides, the internet, etc., I feed the question into ChatGPT. I don’t blindly copy down its steps. Instead, I stop reading when I find something ChatGPT does differently, understand what it is/why it can be used, then try my hand at the problem again. Normally, these little “hints” are enough, and are great time savers. Instead of bypassing struggle, a key aspect of true learning, this method allows me to pinpoint the topic/technique and surrounding context without having to slog through other topics in a dense textbook. I also use it as a know-it-all problem solver, like a friend who’s really good at trivia. Want to find an incredibly niche ...
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AI: Exploitation at its finest

 Nolan Hatchell-McNeil Prof. John Horgan - HST401 12 March 2026 Artificial Intellegence as a concept is quite fascinating, using silicon to generate solutions, ideas, and conversations. Firing up data center computing tasks at a rate no human could fathom, this technology at its apex. Unfortunately the apex of technological advancement is profitable for those who stand at the precipice of capitalism. For those unfortunate enough to have the resources needed to create those silicon chips are experiencing an unrelenting plight, bending to the whims of tech giants in silicon valley. The advent of Artificial Intelligence in its current state is not only a reminder of capitalism’s exploitative nature, but as an omen for the shape of exploitation to come.   We can start at the metals needed to design the chips for AI data centers. Many of the needed precious metals to design chips come from the exploitation of Democratic Republic of Congo. The  Democratic Republic of Congo...
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The Surveillance Future

  Connor Hsuan Professor Horgan HST 401 7 March 2026 I pledge my honor that I have abided by the Stevens Honor System. The Surveillance Future        When it comes to my AI usage, I do often use some Large Language Models, like ChatGPT or Claude, for general references. Most recently though, I have been researching and training object detection and facial recognition software for my senior design project. While my team did encounter several issues while working on our project, we are making steady progress with our machine learning model. However, through my research, I started learning about how this technology was being used at larger scales, such as being implemented with existing surveillance technology. While I understand some of the potential benefits to this technology, such as crime prevention or suspect identification, there are also a massive amount of concerns that come with this. With the continuous growth of the AI industry, many peop...
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