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Category: Technology

How AGI has become the most consequential conspiracy theory of our time

How AGI has become the most consequential conspiracy theory of our time

Will Douglas Heaven writes: Are you feeling it? I hear it’s close: two years, five years—maybe next year! And I hear it’s going to change everything: it will cure disease, save the planet, and usher in an age of abundance. It will solve our biggest problems in ways we cannot yet imagine. It will redefine what it means to be human. Wait—what if that’s all too good to be true? Because I also hear it will bring on the apocalypse…

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Norway’s sovereign-wealth fund votes against $1 trillion compensation for Elon Musk

Norway’s sovereign-wealth fund votes against $1 trillion compensation for Elon Musk

electrek reports: A major Tesla shareholder announced that they are voting against Elon Musk’s CEO compensation package, but the odds are still in his favor. As we have been extensively reporting over the last few weeks, Tesla shareholders are set to vote on a new compensation package for Elon Musk worth up to $1 trillion. The package is highly controversial. On one hand, the board, Musk, and his fans are presenting it as an “all or nothing” situation on which…

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ICE has powerful Clearview AI facial recognition app that Illinois cops are barred from using

ICE has powerful Clearview AI facial recognition app that Illinois cops are barred from using

Chicago Sun-Times reports: The Trump administration has wiped a facial recognition policy from its website while further embracing the controversial technology and securing a $9 million contract with a company barred from selling to Illinois law enforcement agencies. The ban was the result of a lawsuit filed in Cook County that alleged Clearview AI’s massive database of photographs pulled from across the internet violated a landmark state law protecting people’s personal information. But a settlement of the case didn’t apply…

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‘No restrictions’ and a secret ‘wink’: Inside Israel’s deal with Google, Amazon

‘No restrictions’ and a secret ‘wink’: Inside Israel’s deal with Google, Amazon

+972 Magazine reports: In 2021, Google and Amazon signed a $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government to provide it with advanced cloud computing and AI services — tools that were used during Israel’s two-year onslaught on the Gaza Strip. Details of the lucrative contract, known as Project Nimbus, were kept under wraps. But an investigation by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and The Guardian can now reveal that Google and Amazon submitted to highly unorthodox “controls” that Israel inserted into…

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Chatbots are pushing sanctioned Russian propaganda about Ukraine

Chatbots are pushing sanctioned Russian propaganda about Ukraine

Wired reports: OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, DeepSeek, and xAI’s Grok are pushing Russian state propaganda from sanctioned entities—including citations from Russian state media, sites tied to Russian intelligence or pro-Kremlin narratives—when asked about the war against Ukraine, according to a new report. Researchers from the Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD) claim that Russian propaganda has targeted and exploited data voids—where searches for real-time data provide few results from legitimate sources—to promote false and misleading information. Almost one-fifth of responses to…

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The myth of Israeli innovation

The myth of Israeli innovation

Rhys Machold writes: On June 4th, The Times of Israel reported that in 2024, annual Israeli arms exports had reached an all-time high of $14.8 billion, with Europe buying 54% of the weapons. The article noted that Israeli officials had previously been concerned that Western European allies may cancel weapons deals or sanction Israeli manufacturers over the country’s war of extermination in Gaza. Once the record-breaking export figures came out, however, Israel’s war ministry publicly argued the opposite, claiming that the campaign in Gaza…

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Will AI avoid the ‘enshittification’ trap?

Will AI avoid the ‘enshittification’ trap?

Steven Levy writes: As companies like OpenAI get more powerful, and as they try to pay back their investors, will AI be prone to the erosion of value that seems endemic to the tech apps we use today? Writer and tech critic Cory Doctorow calls that erosion “enshittification.” His premise is that platforms like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and TikTok start out aiming to please users, but once the companies vanquish competitors, they intentionally become less useful to reap bigger profits….

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Humans have an internal lunar clock – but light pollution is disrupting it

Humans have an internal lunar clock – but light pollution is disrupting it

Flash Vector/Shutterstock By Stefano Arlaud, Queen Mary University of London Most animals, including humans, carry an internal lunar clock, tuned to the 29.5-day rhythm of the Moon. It guides sleep, reproduction and migration of many species. But in the age of artificial light, that ancient signal is fading – washed out by the glow of cities, screens and satellites. Just as the circadian rhythm keeps time with the 24-hour rotation of the Earth, many organisms also track the slower rhythm…

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Amazon plans to automate 75 percent of its operations with robots

Amazon plans to automate 75 percent of its operations with robots

The New York Times reports: Over the past two decades, no company has done more to shape the American workplace than Amazon. In its ascent to become the nation’s second-largest employer, it has hired hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers, built an army of contract drivers and pioneered using technology to hire, monitor and manage employees. Now, interviews and a cache of internal strategy documents viewed by The New York Times reveal that Amazon executives believe the company is on…

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Generative AI has access to only a small slice of human knowledge

Generative AI has access to only a small slice of human knowledge

Deepak Varuvel Dennison writes: A few years back, my dad was diagnosed with a tumour on his tongue – which meant we had some choices to weigh up. My family has an interesting dynamic when it comes to medical decisions. While my older sister is a trained doctor in Western allopathic medicine, my parents are big believers in traditional remedies. Having grown up in a small town in India, I am accustomed to rituals. My dad had a ritual too….

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Inside tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-record lectures about the antichrist

Inside tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-record lectures about the antichrist

The Guardian reports: Peter Thiel, the billionaire political svengali and tech investor, is worried about the antichrist. It could be the US. It could be Greta Thunberg. Over the past month, Thiel has hosted a series of four lectures on the downtown waterfront of San Francisco philosophizing about who the antichrist could be and warning that Armageddon is coming. Thiel, who describes himself as a “small-o Orthodox Christian”, believes the harbinger of the end of the world could already be…

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Threat to global markets: Risks posed by AI bubble and Federal Reserve losing credibility

Threat to global markets: Risks posed by AI bubble and Federal Reserve losing credibility

The Guardian reports: The Bank of England has warned there is a growing risk of a “sudden correction” in global markets as it raised concerns about soaring valuations of leading AI tech companies. Policymakers said there were also threats of a “sharp repricing of US dollar assets” if the Federal Reserve lost credibility in the eyes of global investors. It comes as Donald Trump’s continues to attack the US central bank and threaten its independence. Continued hype and optimism about…

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Elon Musk gambles billions in Memphis in a struggle to catch up on AI

Elon Musk gambles billions in Memphis in a struggle to catch up on AI

The Wall Street Journal reports: For Elon Musk, ground zero of the artificial intelligence arms race is a 114-acre tract of grass and swamp on the state line of Tennessee and Mississippi. This once-sleepy plot of land, filled with groves of water-rooted tupelo trees at its western edge, is now part of a growing empire Musk is accumulating in the Deep South, just a few miles from Elvis Presley’s homestead at Graceland. Labor crews hired by Musk’s xAI were excavating…

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How far are colleges willing to go to limit the harms caused by AI?

How far are colleges willing to go to limit the harms caused by AI?

Tyler Austin Harper writes: Since the release of ChatGPT, in 2022, colleges and universities have been engaged in an experiment to discover whether artificially intelligent chatbots and the liberal-arts tradition can coexist. Notwithstanding a few exceptions, by now the answer is clear: They cannot. AI-enabled cheating is pretty much everywhere. As a May New York magazine essay put it, “students at large state schools, the Ivies, liberal-arts schools in New England, universities abroad, professional schools, and community colleges are relying…

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Can the Trump regime ban apps that track ICE agents?

Can the Trump regime ban apps that track ICE agents?

BBC News reports: The US government and law enforcement agencies have hit out at developers and users of apps which track Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), arguing they threaten the lives of agents. The FBI says the man who targeted an ICE facility in Dallas – killing two detainees – had used these types of apps to track the movements of agents and their vehicles. A tracking app downloaded more than a million times that shows the movements of immigration…

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AI-generated social media has arrived ‘where seeing is not believing’

AI-generated social media has arrived ‘where seeing is not believing’

NPR reports: A fascist SpongeBob SquarePants, a dog driving a car and Jesus playing Minecraft – these are just a few of the things you can see as you flip through OpenAI’s new app populated exclusively with short-form videos generated using artificial intelligence. And if you can’t find what you’re looking for, don’t worry: you can make it with ease using a small text-based prompt window in the app. The result is a highly addictive stream of sometimes funny and…

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