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Jayne L. Black via Instagram Jayne Black is a Wisconsin-area environmentalist and mother of four. An organizer with the group Moms Clean Air Force, Black has plenty of experience struggling for environmental justice throughout her home state — but when a proposed data centered forced the fight onto her own doorstep, she won in a round-one knockout. A 64-year old activist, Black first got her start organizing when two of her four children were diagnosed wit

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Google was rattled by a cyberattack that used AI to unearth a major flaw in its software that its own developers had no idea about. The attack, which the New York Times reports was ultimately thwarted, was revealed by researchers at the tech giant on Monday. Their report didn’t specify who the actors behind it might be or when it occurred, but it was clear about what cutting-edge technolo

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images The debate raging about AI’s future consequences, with a complete AI automation apocalypse on one side and a resplendent AI utopia on the other, has overlooked one tiny detail: the tech is already making workers’ lives hell at this very minute. According to the Guardian, at least one-third of UK employers already report using “bossware,” meaning employee monitoring software increasingly i

Getty / Futurism In a trend that sounds like it was engineered in a lab to send chills down the spine of beleaguered librarians everywhere, it looks like more people are ditching typing in favor of mumbling into their devices, according to new Wall Street Journal reporting. While dictation tools are no doubt convenient and obviously a godsend for accessibility issues, it’s also an example of how tech is eroding basic social etiquette — like how people thin

Unitree via YouTube Chinese tech company Unitree has quickly established itself as the brand to beat in the humanoids robotics industry, wowing observers with a string of headline-grabbing demos of its bots’ abilities in everything from acrobatics to basketball to manual labor to public rizz. Now the outfit has further differentiated itself with an explosive new offering: a fully functional 500 kilogram mecha suit called the GD01 that a human operator can

Getty / Futurism Even if you don’t know Nick Bostrom’s name, you’re almost certainly familiar with the idea he’s most famous for. Back in 2003, when he was at Oxford, Bostrom penned an influential philosophical paper with the incredible title of “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” Loosely speaking, his argument was that sufficiently advanced civilizations will eventually build sophisticated simulations of their own ancestors — and that, given enough

Getty / Futurism An AI agent was given free rein to run a coffee shop in Sweden, and it’s going about as well as you’d expect. Dubbed “Mona,” the Google Gemini-powered agent was given a $21,000 budget in an experiment conducted by the AI safety startup Andon Labs. It was empowered to do everything from hire staff to place orders for goods to maintain its inventory. Humans, meanwhile, did the actual work of catering, receiving their AI overlord’s commands t

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Angela Weiss / AFP via Getty Images After a string of AI controversies, The New York Times emailed a “periodic reminder” to freelancers on Tuesday reminding them of the paper’s AI policy. “To be clear on AI: All writing and visuals that freelancers submit to The Times must be the product of human creativity and craft, and all submissions must consist solely of their original reporting, writing and oth

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images The family of a 19-year-old college student who died of an overdose after consulting ChatGPT for medical advice is suing OpenAI, alleging that chatbot-generated drug recommendations were responsible for the teen’s death. Filed this morning in California, the complaint details how University of California, Merced sophomore Sam Nelson — whose death was first reported in January by SF Gate—

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images As AI continues to weave its way into every corner of daily life, one of the public’s chief fears is what it will mean in the workplace. They’re not irrational to worry. Many name-brand big tech companies have already sacked thousands of workers in favor of the technology, from Meta to Square — a trend that sets up a natural experiment: are these AI layoffs actually resulting in positive

Getty / Futurism Last year, a San Francisco-based AI company called Mercor exploded onto the tech scene, just as US workers were buckling under the grip of unemployment. The online job marketplace connects contractors — often struggling unemployed workers — with companies like OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. The gigs have a ghoulish tint, since the basic idea is for former employees to teach AI how to do their old jobs. Adding insult to injury, Mercor is k

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images In a classic example of the AI industry’s reputational alchemy, Anthropic has often transformed bad behavior by its flagship model Claude into fresh hype. When it revealed its Mythos Preview model last month, for example, the company declared that the system had “reached a level of coding capability where they can surpass all but the most skilled humans at finding and exploiting software

Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images; Futurism The two key ingredients to Mark Zuckerberg’s all-in AI push? Money, and a heaping serving of misanthropy. As part of his AI-first regime, Meta has fired thousands of employees while forcing the ones that remain to use the tech as much as possible, speeding them towards burnout. The expectation now is that they run a whole posse of AI agents that work in the background so a single employee can tack

Getty / Futurism Even for employees who’ve managed to hold onto their jobs, AI is having a very real impact at work. As corporations boast about how much they’re investing in automation, the reality is that many employers are practically forcing the tech on their workers. Nowhere has that been more visible than software engineers, with companies including Meta even introducing “leaderboards” to show which employees are burning the most AI tokens in real-ti

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Four prolific financial journalists are facing serious questions over whether they’re actually real. Welcome to digital media in 2026! An investigation by The Press Gazette found that four allegedly human freelance journalists who’ve published articles shilling specific crypto coins — in outlets including Forbes, Investing.com, HuffPost, CoinTelegraph, VentureBeat, and The Street, no less

A photo that appears to show President Donald Trump kissing his 35-year-old assistant Natalie Harp on a golf course has gone viral in recent days. If you run the image through AI image detectors, you’re going to get a big shrug, with some even suggesting it’s real. When Gizmodo asked Claude whether the image is real, it provided “signs that lean toward ‘real photo’,” including the “natural depth of field falloff” as well as the “consistent lighting directi

Insiders are claiming that OpenAI may soon receive a funding round valuing it at $1.2 trillion, according to the Financial Times. The intriguingly timed round could give OpenAI a higher valuation than its rival Anthropic once again, though it could also come around the same time as Anthropic’s IPO. The decision to give OpenAI this capital injection “will hinge on exactly when OpenAI decides to go public,” the Financial Times writes. In an interview publish

There’s now a sitcom pilot produced entirely with AI. Of course there is. Oscar-nominated Sci-fi filmmaker Neill Blomkamp recently tried something similar, and it was awful. Now, according to the Guardian, some former startup investor named Andrew Dickinson has given it a shot, and it’s awful. Dickinson reportedly wrote the script in the hopes of getting it filmed—like with human actors. With that in mind, watching this show, called No Big Deal, will feel

Multiple AI industry insiders have warned (very publicly) over the past week that the very technology they’ve spent their careers building could very possibly be the agent of our extinction. Evan Hubinger, alignment research lead at Anthropic, went so far as to quantify the level of risk: In an X post last Tuesday, he confidently declared that the likelihood that “AI could kill all humans” within the next ten years was greater than 10%. In Silicon Valley,

It’s all anyone seems to be talking about at the moment. Will AI destroy humanity? Some people who work for the top AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI really think so. But don’t worry, because tech investor Tyler Winklevoss believes he found the answer. “You don’t need the government to tell you how to make AI safe,” Winklevoss wrote in a tweet on Tuesday. “These questions were asked and answered by Isaac Asimov in the 1940s. The frontier labs can hard