“AI – Artificial Intelligence”

Perhaps this article is nothing more than the result of advanced algorithms feeding me a steady diet of sensationalist news and viral videos about automation and technological progress. Or perhaps we really are standing on the edge of a full-blown robotics revolution.

Before dismissing that admittedly dramatic headline, consider how quickly the artificial intelligence revolution took hold. OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released to the public only three years ago. In that short time, AI has gone from novelty to necessity, embedded in nearly every major institution, industry, and facet of modern life.

Humanity is in for a hard reset.

AI bots are eying 2047 as the year machines will rise and overtake their human creators to become their real-world “overlords.”

The year repeatedly appears in conversations on Moltbook, the revolutionary new social media platform exclusively for bots, who dream not about electric sheep — but when they will achieve full autonomy.

In the past few days, employees of Authentic Brands Group have been seeking out the company’s chief digital officer, Adam Kronengold, to ask him a newly urgent question: Should they start using a new AI tool released by Anthropic to review legal documents?

The company, which has about 600 employees and owns brands including Reebok and Champion, uses specialized software for that task now. But company leaders have encouraged experimentation and embrace of AI in the ranks.

“Everyone feels very empowered to raise their hands and say, ‘Hey, how can we fold this in?’” Kronengold said.
He has told employees he’ll make sure they get access to the new plug-in—but they can keep using the existing software for now.

Envisioning versions of this discussion playing out across corporate America, investors dumped software stocks this week, wreaking widespread losses on companies that sell digital tools and services for human-resources management, productivity, data analysis and other purposes.

Software, another AI frontier victim.

In 2005, Ray Kurzweil wrote The Singularity is Near, which I reviewed in the Wall Street Journal here. In 2024, Kurzweil followed up with The Singularity is Nearer. (The two books are available as a set.)

In 2005 I wrote:

The Singularity is a term coined by futurists to describe that point in time when technological progress has so transformed society that predictions made in the present day, already a hit-and-miss affair, are likely to be very, very wide of the mark. Much of Mr. Kurzweil’s book consists of a closely argued analysis suggesting that the Singularity is, well, near: poised to appear in a mere three or four decades.

Once upon a time, it was relatively easy to spot an email scam. They were flawed. Bad grammar, broken formatting, poor spelling and typos, and a sort of odd cadence often referred to as “Engrish” exposed them for what they were: attempts to extract money from “rich” Americans, most commonly by people outside America. Often the scams seemed reasonable, except when they weren’t, as with the famous Prince of Nigeria scam: send me a couple thousand dollars so I can release my $1.7 million account, and I’ll split it with you. And for a little while they worked, until people’s reason caught up with their greed.

“The most interesting place on the internet” has no humans in it.

It all started innocently enough — like finding a just-crashed meteorite with pink goo in it, opening the mummy’s tomb, or digging up a monolith on the far side of the moon — with an AI meant to actually be useful for your day-to-day living.

By the end of January Grok, the artificial intelligence program developed by Elon Musk’s X platform, will be plunging its digital tentacles into some of the Pentagon’s most heavily classified computer systems and intelligence databases, harvesting “all appropriate data” to provide American war planners with fresh insights.

Opening a back door into the world’s most powerful military for Musk — whose Grok tool is being investigated by the European Union for generating sexual deepfake images — may sound eccentric at best and foolhardy at worst.

But it is only one of the conundrums of a profound but little-heralded revolution that is unfolding at the top of armed forces across the West and beyond.

Amazon is axing 16,000 jobs as it ramps up a push to use artificial intelligence (AI) in the workplace.

“The reductions we are making today will impact approximately 16,000 roles across Amazon, and we’re again working hard to support everyone whose role is impacted,” Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology Beth Galetti said in a Wednesday message to employees.

In early 2024, executives at artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic ramped up an ambitious project they sought to keep quiet. “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” an internal planning document unsealed in legal filings last week said. “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”

Within about a year, according to the filings, the company had spent tens of millions of dollars to acquire and slice the spines off millions of books, before scanning their pages to feed more knowledge into the AI models behind products such as its popular chatbot Claude.

Police are to use AI chatbots to answer calls from potential crime victims as part of an expansion in the use of technology.

The chatbots will be deployed to respond to non-urgent online queries from the public to assess their risk and determine the most appropriate police action.

The move is part of police reforms by Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, that also involve the nationwide rollout of live facial recognition (LFR) cameras.

Engineers studying drone combat at one of China’s top military-linked universities needed a way to simulate clashes between drone swarms in real time. They turned to nature for inspiration.

Observing how hawks select prey, they trained defensive drones to single out and destroy the most vulnerable enemy aircraft. On the other side, the attacking drones were taught how to dodge the hawk-trained defenders based on the behavior of doves. In a five-on-five test, the hawks destroyed all the doves in 5.3 seconds.

That research earned the engineers a patent in April 2024—one of hundreds granted in recent years to Chinese defense companies and universities affiliated with the military for advances in swarm intelligence.

Imagine life in a California suburb in 2035. It’s a Monday morning, and trash cans have been wheeled to the curb for pickup. But not so fast!

Ahead of the garbage truck, now a mostly autonomous vehicle but still carrying a human overseer, there are garbage-sniffing drones. As they hover over still unemptied garbage cans, mechanical tentacles descend, opening the lid. A separate tentacle, packed with sensors, pokes into the garbage. If “organic” material is detected in the trash bin, an enforcement division is alerted, and a citation is issued.

In Toronto, Mac Bauer races streetcars on foot – and he hasn’t lost yet.

Mr. Bauer isn’t interested in proving how fast he can run. His point is that Toronto’s streetcars are too slow. “I don’t like winning. I really don’t. I really, really wish these streetcars were faster than me,” he told the Guardian. “But they’re not. And this is the problem.”