You gotta see the humor in this. While the Hollywood unions are over there screaming at Martin Scorsese for his use of AI for storyboarding, over here, Netflix has already utilized AI in some 300 programs this year.
Picture it this way … Someone is vacuuming while their house is on fire.
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.
The debate around AI reminds me of the debate around transsexuals. At first, everyone tiptoed around, not sure of what to think and worried about saying the wrong thing. Then, after a couple of years of cowardly pussyfooting, someone finally said, “Y’all, a guy can’t magically become a woman.” And because one person said it, more and more people found the courage to repeat an obvious truth: that no amount of surgical mutilation, online censorship, media propaganda, and emotional blackmail makes it possible to switch sexes.
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.
All this talk coming from Hollywood against AI is either hypocrisy, ignorance, or self-interest. AI is coming. Nothing will stop it. And that’s a good thing.
As the New York Post points out, A-level names such as Martin Scorsese, Ben Affleck, Michael Caine, Matthew McConaughey, Darren Aronofsky, and Doug Liman have already jumped on board. And while they pay lip service to the trade unions, claiming no human job will ever be replaced with AI, everyone knows that’s total BS.
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
