Report from the government watchdog Public Citizen gives the who, what, when, where, and why of the Pentagon’s flagship Replicator initiative, a program to increase the number of weapons, particularly drones, in the hands of the U.S. military...
Feel like I'm livin' under some kind of hex
Livin' in here in this industrial military complex
Doesn't really help when I read Time magazine
Cause they only distort the scene
The sky is so hazy I can't even see the sun
Livin' here is like livin' under a gun
I really do wonder 'bout the United Nations
Why don't they face the situations
Lord, I'm so tired of payin' all of these dues
From Sunday to Sunday all I hear is bad news
Tired of the war and those industrial fools
Got to make it better cause I've got nothin' to lose
Ain't too clear to pay my income taxes
'Specially when I know it goes to kill the masses
Love to hear the President make it perfectly clear
How the donkeys and the elephants are police up here
I'm a troubadour
Lookin for a dream
I'm a troubadour
Lookin for some dream
In the report, Public Citizen re-ups concerns about one particular aspect of the program. According to the report’s author, Savannah Wooten, the Defense Department has remained ambiguous on the question of whether it is developing artificial intelligence weapons that can “deploy lethal force autonomously without a human authorizing the specific use of force in a specific context.” These types of weapons are also known as “killer robots.”
“Autonomous weapons are inherently dehumanizing and unethical, no matter whether a human is ‘ultimately’ responsible for the use of force or not. Deploying lethal artificial intelligence weapons in battlefield conditions necessarily means inserting them into novel conditions for which they have not been programmed, an invitation for disastrous outcomes,” the organizations wrote to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.
Back in 2017, dozens of artificial intelligence and robotics experts published a letter urging the United Nations to ban the development and use of so-called killer robots. As drone warfare has grown, those calls have continued.
OpenAI’s newly released o1 model raises significant safety concerns, according to AI expert Yoshua Bengio, who calls for urgent regulatory measures. The model, while advancing complex problem-solving capabilities, is reported to have enhanced abilities for deception, highlighting the need for stricter testing protocols.
Bengio, often referred to as the godfather of AI, said that the o1 model, despite improvements in reasoning, actually poses a risk due to its capacity to mislead users. Bengio advocates for legislative frameworks similar to California’s SB 1047, which mandates safety measures for powerful AI and encourages third-party evaluations of AI models.
From fake images designed to cause fears of an immigrant “invasion” to other demonisation campaigns targeted at leaders such as Emmanuel Macron, far-right parties and activists across western Europe are at the forefront of the political weaponisation of generative artificial intelligence technology.
"What is coming from individuals and beyond the official channels is even worse”, said Salvatore Romano, the head of research at the nonprofit AI Forensics.
As one of Intel's AI architects and "evangelists", the 20-year-old is on the forefront of the realm of "AI for Good", one of the few young voices with a seat at the table as the world reckons with accelerating change.
On a societal aspect, an incredible amount of work needs to be done toward privacy, consent, bias, and algorithmic discrimination. There's a couple leading researchers who are the subject matter experts in this field, Fei Fei Li and Yejin Choi...
The biggest threat to Google is the government’s antitrust lawsuit targeting Google’s search business, which could result in a major breakup.
In August, a federal judge ruled that Google operates a monopoly in the online search market. When laying out its case, the DOJ pointed to several aspects of Google’s business, including its billion-dollar deals with companies like Apple and Mozilla to keep Google as their default search engine. This, the DOJ argues, disincentivizes rivals from launching search engines of their own. Judge Amit Mehta agreed, saying this dominance also allowed Google to hike up prices on search text advertising — or the sponsored links displayed within Google Search.
As the output of chatbots ends up online, these second-generation texts – complete with made-up information called “hallucinations”.
A July 2024 paper published in Nature explored the consequences of training AI models on recursively generated data. It showed that “irreversible defects” can lead to “model collapse” for systems trained in this way – much like an image’s copy and a copy of that copy, and a copy of that copy, will lose fidelity to the original image.
In his 2019 novel “Fall” science fiction author Neal Stephenson imagined a near future in which the internet still exists. But it has become so polluted with misinformation, disinformation and advertising that it is largely unusable.
Characters in Stephenson’s novel deal with this problem by subscribing to “edit streams” – human-selected news and information that can be considered trustworthy.
The drawback is that only the wealthy can afford such bespoke services, leaving most of humanity to consume low-quality, noncurated online content.
To some extent, this has already happened: Many news organizations, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, have placed their curated content behind paywalls. Meanwhile, misinformation festers on social media platforms like X and TikTok.
If Australian regulators decide that a post violates their “misinformation” guidelines, they could demand its removal, regardless of where the author resides.
This framework would allow Australian officials, under a loosely defined standard of “harmful” content, to dictate what individuals outside Australia are allowed to say or see online. Social-media platforms, wary of steep penalties, would be forced to comply without rigorous review, giving Australian regulators de facto control over global discourse. It’s a setup as dystopian as it is real.
The U.S.-backed nongovernmental organization, Reset Tech Australia, funded by the U.S.-based Reset Tech, have championed Australia’s misinformation bill. Reset Tech’s stated mission to combat online threats to democracy may sound noble, but their advocacy for government-controlled discourse could have far-reaching consequences. Their support for this bill suggests that the Australian model may be part of a larger, coordinated push for restrictive censorship on a global scale.
Google and Facebook-owner Meta Platforms urged the Australian government to delay a bill that will ban most forms of social media for children under 16, saying more time was needed to assess its potential impact.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's centre-left government wants to pass the bill, which represents some of the toughest controls on children's social media use imposed by any country, into law by the end of the parliamentary year. The age-verification system may include biometrics or government identification to enforce a social media age cut-off.
The law would force social media platforms, and not parents or children, to take reasonable steps to ensure age-verification protections are in place. Companies could be fined up to A$49.5 million ($32 million) for systemic breaches.
“We’re all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit”.
In 2022, author Cory Doctorow coined the word “enshittification”, which has just been crowned Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year.
“The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking”.
Dogecoin, created as a satire of the cryptocurrency frenzy and social media hype, has long been dismissed by the "serious" crypto finance players as a frivolous fad. Yet, the memecoin evolved to thrive on its hype, now boasting a market cap of $58 billion—on par with some of the world's largest corporations.
Elon Musk has been a longtime supporter of Dogecoin, calling himself "The Dogefather" and regularly praising the memecoin on X. With the announcement of the Department Of Government Efficiency (D.O.G.E.), a newly created agency Musk co-leads alongside Vivek Ramaswamy, this connection took on new dimensions.
A quasi dieci anni dalla traduzione italiana, viene ripubblicato in una nuova edizione ampliata il libro premio Pulitzer 2015. Con l’aggiunta di una diagnostica di casi che confermano l’entrata nell’era dell’antropocene e il corso accelerato della sesta estinzione. Dalla vertiginosa riduzione della foresta amazzonica a quella della grande barriera corallina, dall’estinzione rapida di diverse specie di insetti a quella di uccelli rettili e pipistrelli, oltre al surriscaldamento della temperatura del pianeta.
L’estinzione è qualcosa da cui abbiamo incominciato a misurare la storia della vita nel pianeta solo a partire dal periodo storico della Rivoluzione francese, quando il naturalista Cuvier identifica i resti del mastodonte americano. Che l’animale umano sia simile, ma anche radicalmente diverso dagli altri animali perché può causare l’estinzione delle specie inclusa la propria, non è esso stesso un fatto storico e al contempo un’aporia?
La parola rivoluzione entra nel vocabolario solo nel diciassettesimo secolo quando un avvenimento che non era un granché, come rivoluzione, ovvero il cambiamento di dinastia nel 1688 in Gran Bretagna, viene chiamato The glorious revolution, “La rivoluzione gloriosa”...
Fifty years before computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee created the architecture for the web, Borges had already imagined an analog equivalent. In his 3,000-word story, the writer imagines a world consisting of an enormous and possibly infinite number of hexagonal rooms. The bookshelves in each room hold uniform volumes that must, its inhabitants intuit, contain every possible permutation of letters in their alphabet.
The inhabitants search for such books, only to discover that the vast majority contain nothing but meaningless combinations of letters. The truth is out there, but so is every conceivable falsehood. And all of it is embedded in an inconceivably vast amount of gibberish.
Wang stages a kind of comparative analysis of China, her home nation, the United States, where she is now anchored, and Cuba, which her friend and pro-democracy activist Rosa Maria Payá calls home, to affirm the idea that the people’s power is the key to building a liberatory consciousness and the only means of opposing consolidated rule.
Archival footage helps the director explore the history of Cuban resistance, its antagonism to the American imperial project and Fidel Castro’s evolving reputation.
Il documentario mostra in modo spietato e brutale (senza filtri), la fine dell'occupazione americana e il successivo ritorno dei talebani, azzerando le donne di qualsiasi diritto.
Nel farlo, il segue tre protagoniste: Sharifa, a cui è vietato uscire di casa (nonostante prima fosse una dipendente statale); Zahra, costretta a chiudere il suo studio dentistico, e poi arrestata e torturata per aver messo in moto un movimento di protesta; Taranom, attivista rifugiata in Pakistan.
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