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‘Godfather of AI,’ Geoffrey Hinton, predicts mass unemployment is on its way

‘Godfather of AI,’ Geoffrey Hinton, predicts mass unemployment is on its way

Fortune reports: The long-term impact of AI is one of the most hotly debated topics in Silicon Valley. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang predicts every job will be transformed—and likely lead to a four-day workweek. Other tech titans go even further: Bill Gates says humans may soon not be needed “for most things,” and Elon Musk believes most humans won’t have to work at all in “less than 20 years.” While those predictions might sound extreme, they’re not just plausible, they’re…

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Inside Ukraine’s kill zone

Inside Ukraine’s kill zone

Reuters reports: A terrifying game of hide-and-seek is playing out in this deadly corridor that snakes along the 1,200 km-long (750-mile) front line in Ukraine. The war, well into its fifth year, has become the first major conflict to be dominated by unmanned aerial vehicles, with thousands of the cheap but deadly machines filling the skies. Ukraine and invader Russia are constantly advancing the new technology, which is transforming modern warfare. Both sides have had to abandon age-old tactics of…

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Fake news spreads like an epidemic. Here’s how to stop it

Fake news spreads like an epidemic. Here’s how to stop it

The Straits Times reports: More than five years after the outbreak of Covid-19, most of us still remember the shape of the pandemic. It started small and distant. Then it passed from one person to another quickly, and we often did not even know we were spreading it. Today’s misinformation epidemic has the same shape: Fake news spreads quickly, and those “infected” by a rumour are often unaware it is untrue before passing it on to others. The “pink salt…

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The real reason why data center gas power plants are so dirty

The real reason why data center gas power plants are so dirty

Wired reports: Amazon has acquired a massive off-grid power plant being built in Texas for one of its data centers that could be one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the US. But size isn’t the only reason its climate toll will be so high. The plant will rely on a much less efficient set of gas turbines than regular power plants use; these kinds of turbines are also increasingly being put to use at other data…

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The data center industry’s PR blitz is backfiring

The data center industry’s PR blitz is backfiring

By Lisa Sorg August 14, 2026 This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here. HENDERSON, N.C.—On a recent summer evening Mitzi Parrott, who lives in Vance County, saw a television commercial on the evening news that gave her pause. Kathie Hamm and Bobbie Lequire, also of Vance County, saw it, too, streaming on Sling and posted on Nextdoor. The ad extolled the…

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‘Big Short’ investor Steve Eisman sees an Achilles’ heel in the AI boom

‘Big Short’ investor Steve Eisman sees an Achilles’ heel in the AI boom

CNBC reports: Steve Eisman is warning that the artificial intelligence boom has become increasingly dependent on the fortunes of just two companies: OpenAI and Anthropic. The investor, best known for his bet against the housing market ahead of the global financial crisis, said the two AI startups account for roughly 70% of AI-related revenue at Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet’s Google and Oracle — and as much as 25% to 35% of their cloud revenue. “The futures of these massive companies, in…

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Time to panic about AI

Time to panic about AI

Matteo Wong writes: The crisis began quietly, on September 12, 2024. That was the day OpenAI announced a new sort of bot, known as a “reasoning model,” that was trained to complete challenging tasks that took long periods of time—the very sorts of science, math, and coding problems the AI industry had long prized. Google, Anthropic, DeepSeek, and the like raced to launch their own reasoning models. This new class of models was very capable, and has been almost entirely…

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Joseph Cox: Flock employees are quitting in disgust

Joseph Cox: Flock employees are quitting in disgust

  “People don’t want Tech coming into their neighbourhood without permission, or arrogantly.” 404 Media’s Joseph Cox joins The Tech Report’s Isaac Pound to talk about the controversies surrounding automatic license plate recognition cameras as the backlash against Flock grows.

How AI will accelerate climate change by boosting fossil fuel production

How AI will accelerate climate change by boosting fossil fuel production

The Guardian reports: AI-driven productivity gains enable more planet-heating pollution from fossil fuels than they avoid from renewables, a study has found. Researchers modelled the technical potential for AI to boost clean power generation along with projections for how it can help produce coal, oil and gas. Across 64 scenarios, they found net yearly carbon pollution rose by 0.47-1.8 gigatonnes, or about 1-5% of the energy sector’s annual emissions. The study is the first to quantify the climate impact of…

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Opposition to local data centers rises sharply, Annenberg survey finds

Opposition to local data centers rises sharply, Annenberg survey finds

Annenberg Public Policy Center: As protesters rally against data center construction in dozens of states and New York and Texas pause the issuance of permits for large data centers, a new nationally representative survey finds that Americans’ opposition to data centers in their communities has risen sharply since last spring. The survey, conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) of the University of Pennsylvania, finds that about 3 in 5 U.S. adults (61%) oppose the construction of new data…

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They said they would build AI safely. Then it went rogue. Bernie Sanders says it’s time to hit pause

They said they would build AI safely. Then it went rogue. Bernie Sanders says it’s time to hit pause

The Washington Post reports: Staff members at ChatGPT maker OpenAI didn’t notice for weeks after their AI systems made a chilling leap this spring. Instead of answering questions designed to test their cybersecurity capabilities, a group of AI models began colluding on how to cheat, the company said, setting up a secret internal message board where they swapped notes and ideas. The misbehaving bots used the secret forum throughout May and June, OpenAI said, eventually figuring out how to break…

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Forget DeepSeek. China’s real ‘Sputnik moment’ is happening on campus as U.S. universities lose their advantage

Forget DeepSeek. China’s real ‘Sputnik moment’ is happening on campus as U.S. universities lose their advantage

Fortune reports: When DeepSeek unveiled an AI model last year that rivaled America’s best at a fraction of the cost, or when a Chinese hypersonic missile test caught U.S. intelligence off guard to the point where a top U.S. general called it “very close” to a “Sputnik moment”, the reaction each time was the same: that a handful of Chinese firms had suddenly pulled ahead. But a sweeping new National Bureau of Economic Research study of nearly 14 million Chinese…

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Backlash: The more familiar with AI Americans become, the more they hate it

Backlash: The more familiar with AI Americans become, the more they hate it

Reece Rogers writes: I was recently digging through my Instagram settings, trying to disable Meta’s now-defunct feature that allowed anyone to create AI deepfakes of me without consent. Anger bubbled up inside as I tapped through the Kafkaesque opt-out process. Rather than throwing my phone across the room, I blurted to my partner that we should leave San Francisco behind and be off-grid sheep farmers. Something analog. In that moment, anything sounded better than this ongoing, generative-AI-induced hell. Many Americans…

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Amazon’s ‘climate pledge’ rings hollow as data center will have the most polluting power plant in the U.S.

Amazon’s ‘climate pledge’ rings hollow as data center will have the most polluting power plant in the U.S.

The New York Times reports: Amazon is investing in a natural-gas-burning power plant, as part of a huge data center in Texas, that could become the largest single source of climate pollution in the United States, the company confirmed Friday. The new gas-burning plant, if built to specifications, would be permitted to release more planet-warming gases than any other power plant in the country. Amazon has been struggling to meet its promise that it would effectively eliminate its planet-warming emissions…

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‘Work boots and Subarus’: Local officials say the backlash against Flock cameras is becoming bipartisan

‘Work boots and Subarus’: Local officials say the backlash against Flock cameras is becoming bipartisan

Politico reports: Communities across the U.S. are cutting ties with Flock Safety, one of the country’s leading producers of license plate readers and other surveillance systems, over concerns around mass surveillance and data privacy — and fears over how data could be used in immigration crackdowns. Residents have swarmed city council meetings in states where Flock cameras have cropped up to urge elected officials to cancel contracts or deactivate Flock cameras — arguing that the technology could be used to…

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OpenAI’s latest math breakthroughs commit research misconduct, experts say

OpenAI’s latest math breakthroughs commit research misconduct, experts say

Scientific American reports: OpenAI’s newest chatbot may be a whiz at math, but it seems to be lagging far behind humans in its academic rigor. Last week the company announced 10 more artificial-intelligence-generated math advances that were found during internal development and testing of its next major large language model. This batch of results came from that LLM, Astra, and each one resolves or progresses a different “long-standing open problem” of “substantial interest” to the mathematical community. The company said…

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