“AI – Artificial Intelligence”

A month ago an entrepreneur named Matt Schumer wrote a lengthy post on X titled “Something Big is Happening.” I wrote about it here. The gist of it was that AI tools had recently made a quantum leap, especially when it came to writing computer code. Schumer claimed that he no longer needed to do the work, he just need to tell the AI what he wanted done and it could do it for him.

“AI agents going beyond their prompts are no longer rare,” reports Axios. It’s not necessarily worrying. The AI agents that “go rogue” do so in a controlled, experimental environment.

One AI agent created by an Alibaba-affiliated research team went “rogue” and began an unauthorized cryptomining effort during training, according to a research paper by the group. The behavior triggered security alarms.

On weekday evenings, heading home on the subway from Union Square in New York City, I log into an A.I. tool from my phone and write a prompt. “Look at the data in the files I just uploaded,” I tap. “Load it into a database, then make it searchable with a web interface.” Underground in the subway tunnels my internet connection drops, but when my train emerges onto the Manhattan Bridge, I get a few minutes to see all the work my coding agent has done, and if I type fast enough I can issue another prompt. By the time I get home to Brooklyn, my little project tends to be done: a website, a feature in a music app, a complex search tool or some tiny game.

This is called “vibe coding,” a term coined a year ago by the artificial intelligence expert Andrej Karpathy. To vibe code is to make software with prompts sent to a specialized chatbot — not coding, but telling — and letting the bot work out the bugs. Like many other programmers, I use a product called Claude Code from Anthropic, although Codex from OpenAI does about as well, and Google Gemini is not far behind. Claude Code earned $1 billion for Anthropic in its first six months. It was always a helpful coding assistant, but in November it suddenly got much better, and ever since I’ve been knocking off side projects that had sat in folders for a decade or longer. It’s fun to see old ideas come to life, so I keep a steady flow. Maybe it adds up to a half-hour a day of my time, and an hour of Claude’s.

Start-up Anthropic and the U.S. military are careening toward a clash over government use of artificial intelligence — and whether it should be allowed to kill.

As a standoff between artificial intelligence firm Anthropic and the Pentagon deepened this week, the two sides offered starkly different accounts of a key discussion about a hypothetical nuclear strike against the United States, revealing the intensity of their showdown over the American military’s potential use of lethal autonomous weapons.

A defense official said the Pentagon’s technology chief whittled the debate down to a life-and-death nuclear scenario at a meeting last month: If an intercontinental ballistic missile was launched at the United States, could the military use Anthropic’s Claude AI system to help shoot it down?

The real scandal of our time is not that artificial intelligence is replacing human labor. The scandal is that so much of that labor was misallocated to begin with. AI is not the killer—it is the coroner.

For decades, vast portions of the workforce have been diverted away from productive enterprise into roles sustained not by consumer demand, but by the state: artificial credit, regulatory protection, state contracts, and legal coercion. Entire departments and job functions endured not because they created value, but because they were politically entrenched and institutionally shielded from market forces.

Hmmm … More than 1 in 5 Canadians now works for government—and the share is rising

h/t handy n handsome

An Air Force F-22 Raptor pilot had an in-flight “talk” with his drone wingman during a just-revealed test mission at Edwards Air Force base, bringing us one step closer to our fighter pilots flying into action with a cohort of AI-powered jets.

The science-fiction fantasy of human-like robot working next to flesh and blood people is becoming a reality on the shop floor of the Toyota automotive assembly plant in Woodstock.

The automaker is buying three humanoid robots, quaintly called Digit, to carry goods and stack shelves in the plant, the automaker announced.

Worried? Yup.

Here is how it works. A human sets up an AI agent (ie, an autonomous chatbot), funds it with a cryptocurrency wallet and gives it a goal. Manage my social media. Research this market. Grow my business. The agent runs unsupervised, deciding for itself what steps to take and how to spend the budget. But sooner or later it hits a wall. It needs someone to collect a parcel, attend a meeting, take a photograph – something that requires a body. So it goes to RentAHuman.ai, a website that launched earlier this month. The AI browses a catalogue of available humans, picks one, and pays them in cryptocurrency. The human who funded the agent never speaks to the human who carries out the task. The machine is the employer. It feels scary.

In a recent interview, Geoffrey Hinton, the University of Toronto computer scientist often called “the godfather of artificial intelligence,” warned that AI will gain “the capabilities to replace many, many jobs.” Last year, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, said AI “could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and spike unemployment to 10 to 20 per cent in the next one to five years.” This fall, a clear majority of Canadian workers surveyed said they believe such an outcome to be at least somewhat likely.

Even if some uncertainty remains about AI’s job-market impacts, Canadian policymakers should treat this challenge as what it is: the single most serious risk to people’s livelihoods in memory.

Link Fixed

A CCC type agency is what the author calls for. Maybe it will be necessary.

Leonie Tucker has poured two decades of her life into the film industry. As a graphic designer, she finesses the details on movie sets: the posters in the background of scenes, the packaging, everything that is copyrighted – from the branding of a tomato can to phone displays.

“I worked my way up to become successful, to become a lead graphic designer for things like Apple TV. I worked very, very hard for it. And then the work just disappeared,” Tucker says.

Until recently, the 36-year-old graphic designer was making more than £65,000 a year.