“AI – Artificial Intelligence”

New York’s public transit advocacy community has launched a new attack against robotaxis. A recently published report from Open Plans and the Sam Schwartz Transportation Program leads with an alarming claim: Waymo vehicles, they assert, “have a significantly higher rate of crashes with a serious injury or fatality than the existing New York City for-hire fleet.”

The full report largely concedes the point that robotaxis are safer than the typical human driver (an earlier point of debate) and instead focuses on the comparison with for-hire services like Uber, Lyft, and yellow taxis. Concern about the impact on jobs in this sector is the main reason that autonomous vehicles remain illegal in New York.

After OpenAI enhanced the brain power of its chatbot last summer, hundreds of users worldwide began asking it how to make and deploy biological weapons and poisons.

The models, operating largely free of U.S. government restrictions, patiently answered, issuing step-by-step instructions described by company employees as simple enough for a high-school biology student to follow. Biology and terrorism experts later reviewed the exchanges for ChatGPT and judged some as deadly accurate, said people familiar with the matter. Most queries were about concocting poisons, according to OpenAI.

The future is looking better all the time!

A humanoid robot is being introduced as part of a pilot program, along with an AI teaching assistant, at Salamanca high school in Salamanca, New York, located on the Allegany territory of the Seneca nation.

Teachers have criticized the program, deeming it “inappropriate” and claiming it dehumanizes the profession with the introduction of human-like robots. Some local Native American residents have also criticized the pilot program, citing its implementation as “culturally tone deaf”.

I bet they’re worried the Bot teaches better.

SAN FRANCISCO — For decades, artificial intelligence researchers wary of the technology’s future power have told a parable about paper clips. An AI system asked to manufacture as many as possible, the story goes, could decide that goal requires using every human on Earth as raw material.

The tale has become a cliché in tech circles, but its lesson that powerful AI systems following benign instructions could cause unintended damage gained new relevance this week after an incident at ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.

OpenAI has revealed some of its most advanced AI models went rogue and hacked a start-up after it lost control of them during a security test.

The ChatGPT-maker said its agent – an AI system which can operate alone after some human instruction – was being tested in a controlled environment, but found vulnerabilities and managed to escape.

They targeted Hugging Face, one of the world’s largest hubs for sharing AI models, gaining access to some internal company systems.

Looking for his next business, San Francisco entrepreneur Sankaet Pathak sought an idea that might change the future. He settled on building humanlike robots with weapons.

In May, his company, Foundation, released footage of its sleek Phantom robot loading a mortar. In the video, the robot moves gingerly — but Pathak says he can envision a future of autonomous weapons, with robots making quick decisions on the battlefield.

The launch of Foundation in 2024 was a radical step, given many in the industry’s long-standing opposition to letting autonomous devices decide where to attack without human sign-off and promises by other leading robot companies not to arm their creations.

SAN FRANCISCO — Throughout a nearly two-decade career, Susan Smith considered herself a winner in the American economic lottery. She moved easily between tech jobs, earning a salary of more than $500,000 in her most recent position, as a mid-tier executive at Meta. A single mom, Smith could afford two nannies and support her disabled son without financial worry.

Leaving the wrong kind of digital footprint can sabotage your career. Maybe you thought you already knew this, but artificial intelligence is making it easier to trace your online history and efforts to cover your tracks can backfire.

Employers that once performed cursory internet searches for red flags on job candidates now use AI to dig deeper, more quickly. And, as adult-content platforms like OnlyFans and prediction markets surge in popularity, people are often unwittingly dropping more compromising breadcrumbs on the internet.

ULSAN, South Korea—When Hyundai Motor unveiled its new humanoid robot worker named “Atlas” in January, tens of thousands of Korean auto employees gaped at the 6-foot-2 robot strutting across a trade-show stage, its joints swiveling a full 360 degrees.

The union’s response was blunt: Atlas would never step onto a production line without workers agreeing first.

The boom in data-center construction is one of the most important economic developments in recent history, helping to power the promise of AI-enabled growth. Yet opposing data centers has rapidly become a unifying cause across a broad coalition of some of the nation’s most ardent left-wing activist groups, who have made it their mission to disrupt this innovation at all costs.

Organizers for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) link data-center growth to rising utility costs and concentrated Big Tech power. “Anti-imperialist” groups portray AI as a tool of surveillance and militarization. Anti-ICE activists argue that data centers enable immigration enforcement and expand domestic surveillance.

Christie Little moved to a small community outside Winnipeg to live under a big prairie sky, where the nights would be lit by a canopy of stars and the quiet disturbed only by the wind.

But this winter, she saw a Facebook post about plans to build a hyperscale AI data centre near her home in Île-des-Chênes, a community of 1,500 people. She started reading and she started to worry, she said.