OTTAWA — Prime Minister Mark Carney wants Canada to be a leader in the artificial intelligence revolution. NDP Leader Avi Lewis is betting Canadians want to pump the brakes.
From the Hamilton Harbour to rural Saskatchewan, some communities are pushing back against proposals for massive data centres meant to power the AI boom with billions of dollars in investment despite fears about energy use, water consumption and who ultimately stands to benefit.
OTTAWA—Experts are urging Correctional Service Canada to slow down after it claimed using artificial intelligence to help create criminal profile reports for prisoners would save time and maintain accuracy, despite using just six text cases in a trial.
The warnings come as CSC considers rolling out generative AI tools that would summarize sensitive documents used to write influential assessment profiles of offenders going to prisons, as the Star has reported, raising alarm about the potential for the summaries to be tainted by AI-generated hallucinations or biases.
SAN FRANCISCO—In the months after Sam Kirchner disappeared in November, Matthew Hall searched for him on city streets where homeless live and in wooded hills where campers hide away.
Hall worried for the safety of Kirchner, an intense 27-year-old activist who had been leading sit-ins at OpenAI to protest the dangers of artificial intelligence. He feared for OpenAI’s employees, too.
The last time Hall saw him was at the spartan Oakland cottage that served as headquarters for their hard-line group, Stop AI. Kirchner, an electrical engineering technician by training, was angry, insistent that more had to be done.
“I’m done with this,” he said, according to Hall. “The ship may have sailed on nonviolence.”
For more than a century, cities have been shaped around the automobile. Autonomous vehicles (AVs) promise to rewrite that relationship. Advocates envision safer roads, less need for parking and greater mobility for people who cannot drive. Skeptics warn that fleets of robotaxis could eliminate jobs, increase traffic congestion and weaken public transit.
French political figure Éric Zemmour is arguing that robotics represents the true economic future of France, offering a technological solution to labor shortages in factories and farms rather than relying on mass immigration.
“Robotics is the economic future of France. Robots will provide our factories and our farmers with the arms they are missing. France can choose technology rather than migratory submersion through work. For an eternal, powerful, and sovereign France in modernity: more robots, fewer immigrants,” wrote Zemmour on X.
Artificial intelligence researcher Cameron Berg chugged his drink when he spotted OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman at a party in 2024, and hustled over to ask the CEO whether he thought the emerging technology could be conscious or self-aware.
Few tech executives talked about the possibility in public at the time. But to Berg’s surprise, Altman said that OpenAI had started discussing how to detect consciousness in AI systems.
“It was very obviously something that he’s thought about,” said Berg, who has launched a nonprofit organization to work on methods to assess AI consciousness.
President Donald Trump and other conservatives have accused artificial intelligence chatbots of being politically biased against them — and an executive order he signed that said they must be “neutral, nonpartisan tools” triggered fears from Democrats that AI could start tilting to the right.
So, are chatbots politically biased? The Washington Post tested the AI models behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and others using political questions designed by researchers to gauge how chatbots respond to hot-button political issues. The results suggest that chatbots have clear political leanings that can conflict with promises made by the companies behind them.
h/t Neocon
General Motors has sparked outrage after sidelining more than 1,000 workers at its flagship Detroit assembly plant on Friday and announcing they’d be installing 50 new robots.
The so-called ‘cobots’ were installed on the assembly line at GM’s Factory Zero in Michigan as the automaker slashes costs amid weakening demand for its electric vehicles, according to reports.
The robots now work alongside the remaining employees, helping attach vehicle body panels as cars move down the production line, AutoBlog reported.
A Tesla said to be traveling at speeds as high as 70 miles per hour while in Autopilot mode barreled into a Texas home on Friday night and killed a 76-year-old grandmother — the latest deadly crash to put the automaker’s controversial automation technology under scrutiny.
Security-camera footage aired by Houston station KHOU-TV appeared to show the Tesla barreling down a residential street before veering across a front lawn and smashing directly into the brick home.
ALERT: 76-year-old grandmother is dead after a Tesla barrels into her home, going almost 70 miles per hour, in Texas.
Martha Avila was in her home putting away groceries when a Tesla, alleged by the driver to be on autopilot, zoomed through a residential neighborhood, flew… pic.twitter.com/g0jfk7zNG5
— E X X ➠A L E R T S (@ExxAlerts) June 22, 2026
Powerful AI models capable of taking down governments and businesses are mere months away, cyber intelligence agencies for the Five Eyes have warned in a rare joint statement, urging leaders to “act now”.
The surprising public intervention by signals agencies for Australia, the US, the UK, New Zealand and Canada comes after the Trump administration earlier this month decided to block “foreign nationals” from using a much-hyped AI model built by tech company Anthropic, called Fable.
The statement, issued late Monday night Sydney time, said while AI “would help us improve cyber defence over time, it also accelerates the speed, scale, and sophistication of cyber threats”.
Ukrainian drone maker Oleksiy Babenko knows that supercharging his weapons with artificial intelligence opens a Pandora’s box of killer robots. But the chief executive of startup Vyriy sees an even worse choice.
“Either robots will kill us in 50 years, or the Russians will kill us in a year,” he told a recent gathering of AI-arms makers in Kyiv.
Of all the fields AI is upending, few have deeper ramifications for humanity than its role in warfare. Advanced algorithms have quickly swung from playing a supporting intelligence role to acting as agents of death.
The first time Chicago resident John Roberts saw a delivery robot trundling down the sidewalk on his street he was impressed.
“I actually thought they were kind of neat – it felt futuristic,” he says.
But his attitude started to change when, soon after, he was out for a walk with his family. As another robot approached, they found themselves having to dodge it.
Artificial intelligence may be transforming workplaces across Canada, but many workers say the technology has yet to deliver meaningful improvements to their productivity or the quality of their work, according to new polling data.
A survey released by the Angus Reid Institute found nearly half of Canadian workers who have used AI on the job report it has made no difference to their productivity, while more workers expect future AI adoption to have negative consequences than overwhelmingly positive ones.
(Incognito)
A court in the Bavarian capital of Munich on Friday ruled that search engine operator Google can be held directly liable for incorrect answers generated by its “AI overview” feature.
The legal dispute had centered on whether the service should receive the same legal treatment as conventional search results.
A Canadian mother sued OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, in US court on Thursday, alleging that ChatGPT encouraged her daughter to kill herself. The lawsuit is the latest in a slew accusing the company of failing to address dangerous conversations between users and the company’s chatbot.
Kristie Carrier said in a lawsuit filed in San Francisco state court that her daughter, Alice, told ChatGPT about her suicidal ideations more than a dozen times leading up to her death but that OpenAI’s safety systems never flagged the conversations for human review or terminated them.
