“AI – Artificial Intelligence”

PHOENIX—All around this desert city’s sprawling metro area, low-rise office parks with tinted windows and vast parking lots stretch to the horizon. This is America’s back office.

Abundant land and cheap labor made Phoenix a premier place for companies to stash lower-paid office workers who don’t need to be physically close to clients or headquarters. The cubicle-based jobs—customer service, data entry, payroll processing—created a vital ladder to the middle class, helping replace factory work lost to overseas competition.

Now, these white-collar jobs are fading, too, thanks to continued offshoring and, increasingly, artificial intelligence. Tens of thousands of local workers suddenly face an uncertain future.

The boss of Standard Chartered has apologised for saying artificial intelligence would replace “lower value” humans.

Bill Winters, who has run the London-listed bank for more than a decade, said this week that Standard Chartered’s push into AI would eliminate thousands of roles, replacing “lower-value human capital” with technology.

The comments sparked a backlash and in a post on LinkedIn on Friday following the uproar, Mr Winters apologised for his choice of words.

In April, the Big Four tech firms – Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft – pledged to invest a combined $725 billion in AI infrastructure over the next year. The rosy global future these companies envision is fuelled by a never-ending expansion of data centres. These are massive banks of microchips which require vast energy sources to power them, and large reservoirs of water to cool them.

THERE is a fascinating short story by EM Forster called The Machine Stops. In this story, humans live underground and are completely reliant on a machine which does everything for them. Strong, healthy people have been bred out because they become unhappy living underground. Then, one day, the machine stops and humans are plunged back into the harsh Darwinian conditions that we were subject to until the Industrial Revolution. The story is a cliff hanger, but the future is obvious: there is going to be mass death.

OAKLAND, Calif. — “Do you always tell the truth?” an attorney for Tesla CEO Elon Musk gruffly asked Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, in federal court this week.

“I believe I’m a truthful person,” Altman replied. The attorney pivoted, asking him if people Altman did business with would ever think he misled them. “I can’t answer that for other people,” said Altman — but several had already had their say in court.

Altman spoke on Tuesday in the closing days of a trial in which several of his onetime close associates, including former OpenAI executives and board members, testified that he misled or lied to them.

It has been called the most important chart in the world.

Every time one of the world’s top artificial intelligence companies unveils a new system, employees at the US research organisation METR put it through its paces, testing its ability to complete a series of increasingly complex tasks.

The tasks are measured by how long each one would take a skilled human.

As notorious as California freeways are, the state’s leading gubernatorial candidates are vying to make things even worse. Former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra and billionaire fossil-fuel investor Tom Steyer have each vowed to reverse the California DMV policy authorizing autonomous truck testing. Though framed publicly as a safety issue, the candidates occasionally reveal that the real conflict is between labor and technology.

Amazon has become the first retailer in the UK to start a drone delivery service with a limited launch in Darlington, County Durham.

Packages weighing less than 5lb (2.2kg) and containing everyday items such as beauty products, batteries and cables are now being delivered within a 7.5 mile (12km) radius of Amazon’s fulfilment centre.

The tech giant is convinced there is demand for ultra-fast deliveries and hopes to slowly expand the service.

David Brooks recently described the skeptical attitude toward romantic relationships, particularly among younger Americans, as “the Great Detachment.” Brooks views our collective renunciation of binding romantic ties as the logical development of a culture that worships the self, prizing individual autonomy above all else. For Brooks, the modern self chiefly exerts its autonomy through the pursuit of professional success. But while the self may be freer and lighter than ever before in terms of obligations to others, Brooks sees it as rootless, friendless, and partnerless.

Giorgia Meloni has reposted a fake, AI-generated photo of herself dressed in lingerie that has circulated on social media, warning her followers not to trust “dangerous” images they see online.

“There are numerous fake photos of me circulating these days, generated with artificial intelligence and passed off as real by some diligent opponent,” she wrote on X.

Girano in questi giorni diverse mie foto false, generate con l’intelligenza artificiale e spacciate per vere da qualche solerte oppositore.

Devo riconoscere che chi le ha realizzate, almeno nel caso in allegato, mi ha anche migliorata parecchio. Ma resta il fatto che, pur di… pic.twitter.com/or44qru2qj

— Giorgia Meloni (@GiorgiaMeloni) May 5, 2026

The battlefield in Ukraine could soon feature more robot than human soldiers – that is the startling claim made by a Ukrainian-British military start-up.

The BBC visited UFORCE at its London premises, which are unbranded and discreet, a measure the company says is intended to protect it from potential Russian sabotage.

I wanted to know more about the company because of its involvement in what Ukraine says was an unprecedented military operation: enemy territory being seized using only robots and drones.

Drone warfare has now reached a stage where even soldiers have lost hope of escaping! Every strike in this video will make your body shiver. Watch how death descends from the sky! pic.twitter.com/IjLShMVIQ3

— TRISHUL (@TrishulxIN) April 29, 2026