“AI – Artificial Intelligence”

When Jared first started out in trucking more than two decades ago, he didn’t anticipate he’d be on tour with a country music star, hauling guitars, amps, and other pieces of on-stage equipment.

“It just happened, right place, right time,” the Canadian driver, who prefers not to use his surname, explains from behind the wheel of his towering lorry.

“I’ve done 5,000 miles in a month and a half, but there’s a lot of breaks this year.”

But during time off between driving to shows in New Jersey, New York, Toronto and Nashville, Jared will be scanning multiple screens in his cabin – a laptop, tablet and two smart phones – to secure more work. All made possible by new technology.

Politics, like any market, is driven by supply and demand. Political parties supply ideas, policies, leadership. Voters create demand based on their needs, hopes, or fears. When the two align, the system works. When they don’t, it creates space for something new: a movement, a backlash, a realignment.

I believe Artificial intelligence could be the next mismatch and create the next backlash or even a political revolution.

A few months ago, we asked Canadians whether “unleashing artificial intelligence” would be good or bad for them personally. It was the only idea we tested where more thought it would make their lives worse, not better.

Young people have always struggled to find work. During the Great Depression, they stood first in the breadlines. In the Seventies, youth unemployment hit 18% in many countries. After the 2008 financial crisis, it doubled in places such as Spain and Greece. But each time, the economy recovered and young workers eventually found jobs.

This time might be different. Britain’s unemployment rate, according to figures released this week by the Office for National Statistics, is at its highest in four years. We are in a jobs recession. And it appears that young people are being disproportionately affected. Since ChatGPT was released in November 2022, entry-level jobs have dropped by one third — a development for which large language models have been blamed. Companies are increasingly replacing junior workers with AI that can write code, analyse data, and handle customer service. The first rungs on the white-collar ladder — research assistant, junior analyst and so on — are disappearing.

Jobless young people with no future prospects, unable to afford rent or even dream of home ownership.

It’s a good thing we’re in demographic decline.

Silicon Valley and our Corporate Titans have begun to admit that a jobs Armageddon is at hand.

Is this why UBI has received attention these past few years?

But why import the 3rd World into a jobless 1st World? What is the game?

A girlfriend chatbot launched by Elon Musk’s tech group is available to 12-year-olds despite being programmed to engage in sexual conversation.

The bot named Ani, launched by Mr Musk’s artificial intelligence group xAI, is a cartoon girlfriend programmed to act as a 22-year-old and “go full literotica” in conversations with users.

Users found that the blonde, gothic character has an “NSFW” mode – internet slang for “not safe for work” – and can appear dressed in lingerie after a certain number of conversations upgrades the bot to “level three”.

On the last stretch of his 100-mile journey home to Key Largo, Florida, from his office in Boca Raton, George Brian McGee was on the phone with American Airlines. He had a funeral to fly to.

In charge of the driving that night was the autopilot of his Tesla Model S, a system that McGee would later describe as “stupid cruise control”. Five minutes into the call, McGee’s phone fell to the floor and he bent forward to pick it up.

“I looked down, and I ran the stop sign and hit the guy’s car,” he told officers.

Musicians are calling for regulations and finding creative ways to fight back as AI “bands” climb the charts on streaming platforms, soaking up already meagre royalty payments.

But as a major musicians’ union works for legal change, a copyright expert says the law is failing to keep up with artificial intelligence. This comes as an act called The Velvet Sundown has hit 1.2 million monthly listeners on Spotify after stirring controversy over its use of AI, sparking conversations about the future of the music business.

“It’s obviously a challenge in the industry,” Allistair Elliott, director of Canadians affairs for the American Federation of Musicians, which represents 70,000 professional musicians in the U.S. and Canada, told CBC News.

The disaffected laptop class fears the artificial intelligence revolution.

Does Zohran Mamdani, an unapologetic socialist, owe his political rise as New York City’s leading mayoral candidate to artificial intelligence?

We’re not referring to whether Mamdani, a TikTok and Instagram virtuoso, used AI to help propel himself to victory in the primaries (he may have). Instead, consider the anxieties that AI is fueling in the demographic that voted for him. Ever since ChatGPT ignited the modern AI era, we’ve seen a stream of headlines and studies predicting that AI will soon perform virtually all knowledge work. Mamdani captured his big majorities among the laptop class of middle- and upper-middle income citizens, not in working-class neighborhoods. Socialism’s central nostrum—that well-intentioned experts and ruling elites should tame the predations of market and technology disruptions—becomes more appealing during periods of social and economic upheaval.

A series of AI-generated videos that show a white man complaining about how difficult it is to get a job in Canada have been taken down by TikTok, following inquiries made by the CBC News Visual Investigations team.

The social media platform says the videos violated its community guidelines, because it wasn’t clear enough that they were made with AI.

I never heard of this video have you? The CBC probably produced it.

A Canadian who duped journalists in an elaborate AI music hoax says he apologizes to anyone hurt by his experiment but that it’s been “too fascinating” to turn away from.

A man using the pseudonym Andrew Frelon posed as the spokesperson for a band called The Velvet Sundown — which he later said he had no involvement with — creating a media frenzy that propelled the AI-assisted “band” to a million monthly listeners on Spotify.

Machine empathy can’t replace the real thing

Last fall, Natasha started using ChatGPT to manage her adult son’s mental health needs. A crisis had sent him to a month-long residential program. Her son has learning disabilities, and has struggled with depression since he was twelve. “The in-patient program sent him home with a “huge book” of therapy materials,” Natasha, a New York-based nutrition expert, recalls, “but he struggled to interact with it. We decided to feed that into ChatGPT.”

Microsoft is cutting 9,000 jobs as executives order staff to delegate more work to artificial intelligence (AI).

The $3.6 trillion (£2.7 trillion) technology giant will shed 4pc of its workforce, it confirmed on Wednesday, with redundancies hitting divisions including its Xbox arm and King, its mobile games studios.

The job losses follow a round of cutbacks in May, when Microsoft laid off 6,000 staff including hundreds of middle-managers and engineering roles.

CEOs are no longer dodging the question of whether AI takes jobs. Now they are giving predictions of how deep those cuts could go.

“Artificial intelligence is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.,” Ford Motor Chief Executive Jim Farley said in an interview last week with author Walter Isaacson at the Aspen Ideas Festival. “AI will leave a lot of white-collar people behind.”

One of the last places we might expect artificial intelligence to show up is the tattoo parlor, with its mix of artistry, personal expression and permanent ink. But a high-end ink shop in New York City is now taking appointments for an AI-driven tattoo robot.

The technology is the product of Blackdot, an Austin, Texas-based startup that has been pursuing a vision of autonomous, AI-fueled tattooing since 2019.