“AI – Artificial Intelligence”

The biggest names in tech — from Amazon to Microsoft — have poured roughly $675 million dollars in a robotics start-up whose ‘master plan’ is to bring the first commercial ‘humanoid’ to market, powered by AI.

The funding round is nearly ten times as much as the $70 million that this new robotics firm, Figure AI, managed to raise last May.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, through his venture firm Explore Investments LLC, pledged an optimistic $100 million to the company, with Microsoft investing nearly as much, $95 million.

I bet it’s programmed to hate White people.

While living in New Brunswick, I was used to only half a dozen self-checkouts at the superstore near my apartment. But in Australia, self-checkouts are an outsized part of the grocery landscape. Many locations of Coles and Woolworths outlets – the country’s dominant grocery chains – have double that, if not more.

On a recent visit to a central Melbourne Coles, I counted nearly 40 self-checkouts, and only two employees were circulating among them to help customers. Even at grocery stores in large Canadian cities such as Montreal and Toronto, I haven’t come across self-checkout sections as grand at grocery stores.

Satan’s handiwork nothing less.

It might be considered an AI cock-up on a massive scale.

A scientific paper purporting to show the signalling pathway of sperm stem cells has met with widespread ridicule after it depicted a rodent with an anatomically eye-watering appendage and four giant testicles.

The creature, labelled “rat”, was also sitting upright in the manner of a squirrel, while the graphic was littered with nonsensical words such as “dissilced”, “testtomcels” and “senctolic”.

Artificial intelligence isn’t just a niche tool for cheating on homework or generating bizarre and deceptive images. It’s already humming along in unseen and unregulated ways that are touching millions of Americans who may never have heard of ChatGPT, Bard or other buzzwords.

A growing share of businesses, schools, and medical professionals have quietly embraced generative AI, and there’s really no going back. It is being used to screen job candidates, tutor kids, buy a home and dole out medical advice.

Elon Musk is no stranger to bold claims – from his plans to colonise Mars to his dreams of building transport links underneath our biggest cities. This week the world’s richest man said his Neuralink division had successfully implanted its first wireless brain chip into a human.

Is he right when he says this technology could – in the long term – save the human race itself?

Sticking electrodes into brain tissue is really nothing new.

Would you let Elon Musk stick a microchip in your brain? On Sunday, the billionaire’s Neuralink start-up put its first human test subject under the knife. The anonymous patient had a tiny chip inserted under their skull, entwining the minute filaments from the processor into their brain.

Musk hopes the patient will now be able to send instructions to the implant using thoughts alone.

The chip, or “brain-computer interface”, which Neuralink began developing in 2016, promises to change the lives of people with disabilities that prevent them from moving or communicating.

In one of the first in-depth probes of the viability of AI displacing labour, researchers modelled the cost attractiveness of automating various tasks in the U.S., concentrating on jobs where computer vision was employed — for instance, teachers and property appraisers. They found only 23 per cent of workers, measured in terms of dollar wages, could be effectively supplanted. In other cases, because AI-assisted visual recognition is expensive to install and operate, humans did the job more economically.

23% is a lot and the rest won’t be far behind.