The United States is having something of a national referendum on mass surveillance as of late. Embodied most infamously by video surveillance company Flock Safety, Americans from all walks of life are waging war against the proliferation of the company’s automatic license plate readers (ALPR), which the ACLU warns now number in the tens of thousands.

Plenty of communities are organizing campaigns to out-muscle municipal leaders or their cheerleaders on the local police force, and by-and-large, they’re working. Whether in rural towns or sprawling cities, activists who can mobilize citizens to flood council meetings and hold picket signs are finding success. Perhaps most prominently, the Los Angeles Police Department recently allowed its three-year contract with Flock to expire, citing democratic pushback as a significant pressure point.

There’s also another, less-legal side to the anti-Flock sentiment: a rising tide of vandalism. Not content to wait for local officials to strike down ALPR contracts, concerned citizens are taking matters into their own hands by disabling or cutting down Flock camera towers wherever they’re found. But what started as a collection of separate individuals is now rising to the level of a viral phenomenon, as privacy-minded Redditors take to the web to celebrate those who are fighting back with an outpouring of ironic memes and hype reels.

Ground zero for this community appears to be the subreddit r/FlockSurveillance. The forum hosts some 422,000 “activists,” who flood the channel with over 11,000 contributions per week.

Some of the top posts on the subreddit are memes celebrating Flock vandalism: there are crude Photoshop jobs re-imagining covers of the Berenstain Bears as anti-Flock activists, hand-drawn signs encouraging copper thieves to cash in on Flock innards, and an ALPR-themed redesign of the Gadsden flag, to name a few.

Those who’ve been caught and charged with vandalizing ALPRs become digital folk heroes on the subreddit. When news broke that US Air Force engineer Jeffrey Sovern had been charged in connection to the destruction of 13 Flock devices, redditors flooded the post with praise, sharing links to his legal defense fund and encouraging others to donate. (Sovern’s GoFundMe now stands at over $40,000, compared to around $15,440 in early July.)

“I donated to him because those charges are bulls***,” one redditor replied.

In addition to memes, the subreddit has become a destination for serious discussion around ALPRs and surveillance in general. One developer used the forum as a launch pad for their app FlockHopper, a navigation app that helps travelers avoid ALRPs. Others use it to share important developments relevant to the anti-Flock crowd, to get advice on Freedom of Information Act requests, and to dispel misinformation.

“As entertaining a trend as it is, will a few Redditors knocking a few poles over really make a difference?” one redditor asked the group.

“Even a single grain of rice can tip the scales,” a user replied.

More on Flock: Man Trapped in Dystopian Nightmare Thanks to AI Surveillance Cameras Flagging His Every Move

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Psychologist Candice Odgers has studied adolescent mental health for 25 years. She fears the current debate around smartphones obscures some of the biggest issues facing teenagers – from the impact of Covid to the health of their adult caregivers

The quickest way to make being online safer for children and teens would be to kick all adult men off the internet, the Canadian psychologist Candice Odgers believes. Men are the biggest perpetrators of sextortion and most likely to spread misinformation, she says.

Odgers is not recommending this as a policy for governments to adopt: “That would be crazy, right? It would be unfair.” But she is on a drive to puncture the prevailing narrative that the best way to address online harms is a social media ban for teenagers.

Is it not enough to simply watch the beautiful game, unadorned?

These days you might use an AI chatbot to keep abreast of what’s happening in the World Cup. And that AI chatbot, in a sign of the times, might try to shove prediction market odds in your face as another way of ostensibly keeping you up to speed. Because are you really getting the full picture if you don’t know where a bunch of gamblers fall on the outcome?

This is exactly what OpenAI is doing. The Sam Altman-led company quietly struck a deal with Kalshi, which lets you bet on outcomes far beyond sports, to show its prediction market data in ChatGPT, the New York Times reported.

It’s perhaps the inevitable melding of two of the most divisive innovations to come out of the tech industry in recent years.

Searching France and Spain on ChatGPT ahead of their quarterfinal clash on Tuesday returned a graphic that showed that Les Bleus had a 60 percent chance of winning, according to the reporting. (We hope no one acted on that information.) Asking about the England and Argentina game on Wednesday showed that the Three Lions had a 54 percent chance of coming out on top.

Neither side promoted the deal, and the graphic is tellingly light on branding. There are no logos and no outbound links. The only sign of the collab is a small notice in the bottom left corner stating, “Source: Kalshi.”

This is the first partnership of its kind for OpenAI. The company recently updated its help page to stress that users “cannot place bets through ChatGPT,” with the Kalshi data being limited to “queries related to the 2026 World Cup,” according to the NYT.

Zooming out, it’s another sign of prediction markets laundering their image by glomming themselves onto other, more credible brands. In January, Kalshi partnered with CNN to provide its real-time prediction data on the news network’s broadcasts. Its rival Polymarket entered into a similar partnership with Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, that same month. Both have also partnered with Google to show their data in search results.

Unlike traditional betting platforms, prediction markets don’t frame what they provide as gambling: they provide markets, not bets. They allow you to wager on all kinds of real-life events, ranging from the geopolitical outcomes to the completely trivial. Polymarket lets you bet on the destruction caused by wildfires and the use of nuclear weapons, for example, while also giving you the chance to make a buck on whether Cristiano Ronaldo will cry at the World Cup. (He did.)

Their fuzzy legal framework, plus their Wild West approach to gambling, has led to numerous controversies. Suspiciously timed bets on massive events like the US’s capture of ousted Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro have raised concerns of rampant insider trading and put pressure on lawmakers to crackdown on the platforms. Arrests have been made in some cases, but these have been rare.

Put simply, for OpenAI, it may be somewhat risky to associate itself with all this baggage, which might be why the Kalshi collaboration is very limited — at least for now.

More on: Grim New Prediction Market Lets Gamblers Bet on Raging Wildfires

The post OpenAI Strikes Bold Deal With Kalshi to Mix Together the Most Hated Technologies in Existence: AI and Prediction Markets appeared first on Futurism.

All the young people the Guardian spoke to disagreed with aspects of the government’s proposed block

Sixteen- and 17-year-olds in Britain are to be encouraged to observe a midnight to 6am social media curfew but will be able to opt out by changing their account settings.

From next spring, they will be urged to refrain from using certain apps, with the block being switched on by default. But the curfew will not be mandatory and can be overridden.

Many moviegoers this summer are looking forward to Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated film “The Odyssey.” But have you considered that you could watch a pure AI slop adaptation of the Greek epic instead?

Enter “Odysseus: The Fall,” a fully AI-generated movie from the startup Fountain 0. At 135 minutes long, it will certainly test your patience as it hurls screensaver-grade images at you which look cribbed from better movies, creating the impression that this is really a generic amalgamation of other people’s ideas about what Greek mythology should look like, rather than the creators’ own.

The director, Ash Koosha, told Hollywood Reporter  it cost in the “mid-five figures” to make, and openly hopes to cash in on the hype around Nolan’s film.

“We very much hope that Christopher Nolan’s film, ‘The Odyssey,’ is a raging success at the box office, and in some way that our version of the journey of Odysseus might further that success by bringing to theaters those who might not otherwise come out to see the film, simply because they are curious to see the ultimate in human creation and compare it to one man’s collaboration with AI,” Koosha said in a wordy statement.

You have to wonder if Koosha has ever asked Nolan’s thoughts on AI. In a recent interview, the Oscar-winning director was skeptical about the tech, praising Gen Z for “utterly rejecting” for what he described as “AI slop.”

The official synopsis for Koosha’s film sounds suspiciously AI-generated. The film, Fountain 0 says, focuses on “the fractured memory of a drowning man in his final minutes — a voyage that is really a trial, where every monster wears his own handwriting,” per The Hollywood Reporter. 

“Stripped of the word ‘clever,'” it continues, “what remains is a man reckoning with what he actually did to get home. It ends where the songs never go: not with a hero’s welcome, but with forgiveness offered by the one person who knows exactly what he is.”

Wears his own handwriting? Stripped of the word clever? We implore you to guess what any of that means.

A short teaser released by the studio promises that the film will be as sloppy as its synopsis suggests. The footage is impressively photorealistic, but has all the aesthetic trappings of AI, with cliche shots and a familiar uncanny sheen. It was all assembled together in three months, Kosha says, and we can tell.

Kosha enthused about the loose production style that AI afforded, allowing him to constantly fine-tune the footage to meet what Variety generously describes as Kosha’s “unconstrained vision.”

“We’re in post production right now. Still, the script is open to interpretation,” Koosha told the trade publication. “Why? Because the risks don’t exist,” he added, cryptically.

Why this half-baked AI slop-tacle is getting glowing write-ups in Variety and THR when there’s plenty of promising indie movies made at shoestring budgets that don’t even get a sniff at recognition is anyone’s guess.

But at the same time, it’s not surprising. In June, The Wall Street Journal contributed to the hype cycle around the AI-generated flick “Hell Grind” when it erroneously reported it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival. In reality, it was shown in another Cannes event out of competition.

More on AI: AI “Actor” Will “Star” In a New “Movie”

The post We’d Rather Live Through the Trojan War Than Spend 135 Minutes Watching an Entirely AI Version of “The Odyssey” appeared first on Futurism.

Last February, Alice Gilman, the cofounder and chief operating officer of a secretive Silicon Valley longevity startup called R3 Bio, sat for an interview with podcast Skyline Drive. In the interview, she discussed R3 Bio’s aspirations to grow nonsentient humanoid life-forms — from which, in theory, they can grow and harvest organs for implantation into human bodies, or to test future drugs and other treatments without the need for live animal testing.

“It’s just pretty much a heart, lungs, and everything that you would find in a body,” Gilman tells host and journalist Mangesh Hattikudur. “But it’s not technically alive because it’s exclusively the organs. And they’re in this little biological platform that you can test on and you can map out the cross-organ interactions.”

Throughout their conversation, as Hattikudur notes, Gilman refers to these imagined unfeeling meat suits — which will ideally be born without brains — as “organ sacks.” Needless to say, it’s an ambitious (and to many, fundamentally unsettling) concept that raises plenty of nagging bioethical questions — a reality that the company is clearly wrestling with as it entertains the idea in public.

“I try to not be scary to an average person,” Gilman told Hattikudur.

Months after this interview took place, however, Gilman fought to keep it under wraps, as Skyline Drive told Futurism. Why? It’s not exactly clear.

About a week before the podcast episode was set to air, producers for the Skyline Drive reached out to Gilman to fact-check the conversation. To their surprise, Gilman requested that the episode be postponed. Despite describing imagined “organ sacks” in detail, she denied that R3 Bio was working on the concept “for now, period,” and declined to say what it was working on instead.

Gilman didn’t argue that the interview was factually incorrect. Instead, the podcast team said, she vaguely referred to R3 Bio as a “federal asset,” seemingly implying that she had to tread lightly due to government involvement. To be certain, “federal asset” usually implies some kind of ownership or domain over something held by the federal government. Which would imply that the federal government is investing in a company that’s claimed to have worked on “organ sacks.” She also insisted that what she said in her nearly two-hour-long interview was all theory and opinion.

R3 Bio only recently burst into the public sphere. In March, it announced its existence in a buzzy Wired article, in which R3 Bio told the magazine that it was specifically working to create “organ sacks.” Company investor Boyang Wang elaborated on the idea, telling Wired that “replacement is probably better than repair when it comes to treating diseases or regulating the aging process in the human body,” and that “if we can create a nonsentient, headless bodyoid for a human being, that will be a great source of organs.”

But R3 Bio’s ambitions seemingly go far beyond “organ sacks.” A few days after Wired’s piece ran, MIT Technology Review published a deep dive about R3 Bio’s apparent aspirations and its cofounder John Schloendorn — a self-described “biological designer” who has given confidential talks about “full body replacement” and “recent lab progress towards making replacement bodies.” Generally speaking, replacement bodies refer to physical clones that will allow for humans to transplant their heads onto a whole new human body, a still-theoretical idea that’s attracted the fascination of several scientists. (In response to the MIT Tech piece, R3 Bio issued what the outlet described as a “sweeping disavowal” of its findings, and said that “any allegations of intent or conspiracy to create human clones or human beings with brain damage are categorically false.”)

In her interview with Skyline Drive, which took place before Wired or MIT Tech published their respective pieces, Gilman says that the company has “a few milestones that we’re hoping to achieve. The first milestone being we are working on replacing animal testing by using skin stem cells.”

“It’s mostly a stealth project, but the essence of the surface level of what we do is we take skin cells from monkeys and we reprogram them and do some Yamanaka miracles,” she said, referring to the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Shinya Yamanaka’s transformational stem cell research, “that result in fully grown organ systems.”

In its March reporting, Wired found that the company had put out a job listing for a veterinarian in Puerto Rico who could “implant embryos, monitor pregnancies and help deliver healthy births” in nonhuman primates. On its website, however, R3 Bio states that it does “not work with live primates.”

Gilman gave the Skyline Drive interview from an island in Puerto Rico. R3 Bio wanted “monkey access,” Gilman told Hattikudur, but didn’t want to put monkeys in cages, a practice that the cofounder believes is unethical; after all, one goal of her company is to eliminate the need for animal testing.

So instead, they picked an island with a lot of monkeys.

“I’m a big animal rights advocate… I don’t want to keep monkeys in cages,” she told Hattikudur. “And there’s an option to have them run around the island with bracelets on.”

“We wanted monkey access and there’s a lot of monkeys here,” she added. “After negotiating with local companies that are supervising them, we can walk up to them, get some of their skin cells.”

During the conversation with Skyline Drive, Gilman also discussed one very big scientific problem the company is facing: that the less sentient an “organ sack” is, the less likely it is to function effectively.

“So do these organ sacks have the stem of a brain?” Hattikudur asked.

“So the mice models can exist with a very limited set of nervous systems… but then there are other constraints on the ability of the organs to preserve themselves,” Gilman responded. “So there’s a way in which you can skew towards social acceptance and make less nervous system, and then when you scoot towards social acceptance, it looks better, but it’s less scientifically feasible.”

“So we are still making observations about how that would work,” she added.

How far along R3 Bio is right now is murky at best. Gilman cryptically noted that she lives in a “contextual world,” and in that world, “just because we don’t talk about a lot of things, that doesn’t mean they’re not happening.”

On its website, R3 Bio says that while it “would be excited by the future prospect of full-scale human organ fabrication,” it views “the science as currently not ready.”

“We have no ongoing work in this area,” the website notes.

During the interview, Gilman remained confident about the positive impact she believes her company will have. She told Hattikudur that her “worst case scenario” is that she saves “millions of lives,” and that’s a “bet worth taking, regardless of any kinds of blows that are gonna come our way.”

We reached out to R3 Bio to ask why it pushed to postpone the podcast, if it’s currently or planning to obtain skin cells from cage-free island monkeys — and if so, how — and if it has indeed stalled its efforts to create the “organ sacks” it’s now repeatedly discussed in the press. We also asked the company how it defines having “no ongoing work” in the realm of “full-scale human organ fabrication.” We did not hear back at the time of publishing.

In an interview with Futurism, Hattikudur said he was “surprised” by Gilman’s push to suppress the interview.

“The company hasn’t been exactly transparent about what they’re doing,” said Hattikudur. “There’s a lot of mix between the hype they’re telling people and what they’ve actually achieved in the lab, which is not very clear.”

“If they were honest that this is what they believe in, and this is what they’re working on, it would actually be less of a big deal,” he added. “It’s more that they awkwardly seem to be hiding something which everyone kind of knows about.”

More on R3 Bio: A Startup Has Been Quietly Pitching Cloned Human Bodies to Transfer Your Brain Into

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“You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”—George Orwell, 1984

While Americans remain transfixed by the political circus—cheering for their preferred party, jeering at the opposition, obsessing over every manufactured outrage and waiting for the next spectacle—the Surveillance State continues its steady march forward.

It watches where you go, whom you meet, where you worship, what medical offices you visit, what political rallies you attend, what protests you join, what books you read, what websites you visit and what causes you support.

It watches through your phone, your car, your doorbell, your appliances, your purchases, your social media accounts and the cameras positioned along the roads you travel every day.

This is how freedom dies in the digital police state: not always through dramatic declarations of martial law or soldiers stationed on every street corner, but through the gradual construction of a technological dragnet—an electronic concentration camp—so pervasive that privacy becomes impossible and anonymity becomes suspicious.

Enter Flock Safety, a private surveillance technology company whose automated license plate readers have spread throughout thousands of American communities.

These cameras, which do much more than photograph license plates, represent the next evolution of the government’s public-private surveillance partnership.

They document the time and location of every passing vehicle and record identifying characteristics such as its make, model, color, damage, roof racks, bumper stickers and other distinctive features. That information can then be placed in a searchable database and used to retrace a vehicle’s movements over time.

Yet the real power—and the real danger—of Flock does not come from the cameras alone.

It comes from artificial intelligence.

A camera can photograph a car. Flock’s AI-powered platform can identify and categorize a vehicle, compare an observation with stored records, generate alerts, identify connections and help police reconstruct where that vehicle has been.

AI is what transforms a photograph into the building blocks for a suspect society.

With AI, every driver becomes a data point. Every data point becomes a pattern. And every pattern becomes a suspicion.

This is how ordinary movements become potentially suspect and subject to government scrutiny. It allows law enforcement agencies to search not only for a complete license plate number but also for partial plates and physical descriptions such as vehicle color, make, model, damage, roof racks, bumper stickers and other identifying characteristics.

A police officer might ask the system to locate every red pickup truck with a ladder rack seen near a protest, every vehicle that repeatedly visited a particular address, or every car observed traveling between two locations.

The artificial intelligence does the sorting. The database supplies the history.

The government receives a list of potential suspects.

This is no longer surveillance conducted by individual officers following particular leads. It is surveillance conducted at machine speed, across entire populations, with algorithms deciding whose movements merit further scrutiny.

Consider the scale of what is taking place.

License plate cameras now log approximately 20 billion vehicle scans every month.

Twenty billion.

That is not targeted policing. That is mass collection.

The overwhelming majority of those scans do not involve stolen cars, wanted suspects, kidnappings or violent crimes. They document ordinary people carrying out the ordinary activities of daily life: driving to work, taking children to school, visiting friends, attending church, keeping medical appointments, participating in protests or simply going home.

Yet each of those innocent journeys becomes part of a searchable police database.

At 20 billion scans a month, Flock is not searching for particular suspects and then attempting to follow them. It is recording the movements of everyone so police can decide later whom they want to follow.

That is the digital equivalent of assigning a government agent to trail every driver in America—and preserving the agent’s notes in case the government someday finds them useful.

Yet mass collection is only the first stage of the AI surveillance state. The next is merging those billions of observations with everything else the government and its corporate partners know about us.

Flock is also part of a much larger shift toward AI-powered “data fusion,” in which license plate records are combined with facial recognition results, surveillance video, police reports, social media activity, commercially purchased information, gunshot-detection alerts and other government databases.

The danger is no longer merely that one system can track a car. It is the merger of previously separate streams of information into a single system capable of mapping a person’s movements, relationships, habits and associations.

These systems increasingly do more than provide officers with information to evaluate. They assign significance to associations, flag supposed threats and generate investigative leads—often through proprietary algorithms that neither the accused nor the public can examine.

Artificial intelligence does not eliminate human prejudice, institutional bias or bad information.

It industrializes them.

Feed a flawed system inaccurate data, biased arrest records or constitutionally suspect surveillance, and AI can reproduce those defects at a speed and scale no individual police officer could match.

Once the computer labels someone suspicious, moreover, officers may treat the algorithmic conclusion as objective fact.

The machine accuses. The police act. The citizen is left to prove that the machine was wrong.

Despite the extraordinary reach of this technology, Flock continues to portray its system as a limited, carefully controlled crime-fighting tool.

Flock insists that its cameras collect information about vehicles rather than people, that agencies control access to their own data, that searches are logged and that information is generally deleted after 30 days. Yet these assurances largely amount to distinctions without a difference.

Vehicles are extensions of the people who drive them.

Track a vehicle long enough, and you know where its owner sleeps, works, worships, shops, socializes, seeks medical treatment and participates in political activity.

You know when someone leaves home, when they return, whom they visit and how often.

You may not know the contents of their conversations, but you know enough to construct an intimate portrait of their life.

That is surveillance.

It does not become less invasive merely because the government has outsourced the cameras, databases and algorithms to a private corporation.

Nor does it cease to be surveillance because police claim that the information may someday be useful in solving a crime.

Indeed, that is the sleight of hand that has allowed the surveillance state to expand so rapidly.

The government no longer has to install every camera, maintain every database or directly collect every piece of information.

It merely encourages private companies, businesses, homeowners’ associations, schools and individual consumers to create an interconnected surveillance ecosystem—and then asks for access.

This public-private arrangement allows government agencies to acquire capabilities they might never receive public approval or sufficient funding to build on their own.

It also makes accountability almost impossible.

When abuses occur, local police blame the technology provider. The technology provider insists that local police control the data. Federal agencies claim they merely requested access. Local officials say they were unaware that information could be shared beyond their jurisdiction.

Everyone points elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the American people remain under observation.

Flock has become especially controversial because its network can transform what appears to be a collection of local cameras into something far more powerful: a searchable surveillance system that permits law enforcement agencies to look far beyond their own jurisdictions.

Flock says data sharing among agencies is optional and controlled by its customers. Yet the entire value of such a system lies in its interconnectedness.

A camera in one town is a traffic-monitoring device.

Thousands of cameras connected through searchable databases constitute a movement-tracking network.

The danger is not simply that police might search for a stolen car.

The danger is that the system permits government officials to begin with a location, a description or a fragment of information and work backward until someone emerges as a suspect.

That reverses the traditional order of constitutional policing.

Under the Fourth Amendment, police are supposed to develop individualized suspicion, establish probable cause and then apply for a warrant to search for evidence connected to a particular person or crime.

Mass surveillance systems begin by collecting information on everyone.

In the process, every innocent person is treated as a potential suspect whose movements must be recorded just in case the government someday decides they are relevant.

This is guilt by algorithm.

It is also the same constitutional inversion at the heart of geofence warrants, which allow police to demand information identifying every cellphone that happened to be near a particular location at a particular time.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in Chatrie v. United States may signal that constitutional scrutiny is finally beginning to catch up with the surveillance state.

The case involved a geofence warrant used to obtain Google location records for cellphones near the scene of a robbery. Rather than beginning with an identified suspect, police demanded information about devices that happened to be within a designated area during a particular period and then worked backward to identify their owners.

The Supreme Court held that police conduct a Fourth Amendment search when they obtain an individual’s cellphone location history from a technology company.

That conclusion matters.

It rejects the government’s increasingly convenient argument that intimate information loses constitutional protection merely because a private corporation collected, stored or analyzed it.

The Court did not rule on Flock cameras or automated license plate databases. Nor did it decide that every geofence demand is necessarily unconstitutional. The justices left it to the Fourth Circuit to determine whether the warrant satisfied the Fourth Amendment’s probable-cause and particularity requirements at each stage of the search.

Nevertheless, the constitutional principle at the heart of Chatrie extends far beyond cellphones.

The government should not be able to evade the Fourth Amendment by outsourcing mass surveillance to private technology companies.

It should not matter whether the location trail comes from Google, Flock, a cellphone provider, a data broker or an interconnected network of privately owned cameras.

A detailed record of a person’s movements does not become less revealing because it follows a vehicle rather than a phone. The government should not be permitted to accomplish through Flock what it could not constitutionally accomplish by assigning police officers to follow millions of Americans everywhere they drive.

Indeed, Flock may present an even more troubling inversion of constitutional policing.

Geofence searches generally begin with a particular crime, location and period. Flock continuously collects information on millions of vehicles before any crime has occurred and before any individual is suspected of wrongdoing.

Police can then reach backward into that stored history and reconstruct a person’s movements.

The surveillance comes first. Suspicion comes later.

A warrant, when one is sought at all, may arrive only after the government has already built the database it intends to search.

Chatrie may provide constitutional ammunition for challenging this arrangement, but no single court ruling will dismantle the machinery of mass surveillance.

The technology is already embedded in thousands of communities.

The databases are already being populated.

The agencies are already connected.

And the companies profiting from this infrastructure will fight to preserve it.

Unfortunately, constitutional protections have rarely kept pace with the government’s appetite for surveillance.

The dangers are no longer theoretical.

Flock data has reportedly been used in investigations far removed from the serious violent crimes routinely invoked to justify these systems.

This is the inevitable trajectory of every surveillance technology. First, it is introduced as an emergency measure. Then it is justified as a crime-fighting tool. Then it is expanded to lesser crimes. Then it is used for administrative enforcement, political monitoring, immigration investigations and personal purposes.

Eventually, it becomes part of the background machinery of government—a permanent feature of daily life that no longer attracts attention because everyone has become accustomed to being watched.

Surveillance powers created to find kidnappers and violent criminals do not remain limited to kidnappers and violent criminals.

Databases built to locate stolen vehicles do not remain limited to stolen vehicles.

Government agencies cannot resist the temptation to use whatever power is available to them, especially when the use of that power is cheap, easy and largely hidden from the public.

The technology’s potential for error makes this even more dangerous.

License plate readers can misread plates, rely on inaccurate hot lists or associate an innocent vehicle with a crime. Once the system issues an alert, officers may treat the computer-generated result as fact.

The individual on the receiving end may be pulled over, surrounded by armed police, handcuffed, searched or detained before anyone discovers that the machine was wrong.

This is not justice. It is automated suspicion.

Flock is only one component of a surveillance ecosystem that includes doorbell cameras, facial recognition, drones, cellphone tracking, biometric databases and real-time crime centers.

The result is 360-degree surveillance.

A person may leave a home monitored by a smart doorbell, drive past a network of license plate readers, enter a business equipped with facial recognition, carry a phone broadcasting location data and return home along streets monitored by police cameras and private security systems.

At no point does the government need to physically follow that individual, because the infrastructure does it automatically.

Algorithms sort the information. Databases preserve it. Private companies monetize it. Government agencies search it.

All of this is taking place while the country remains locked in an endless partisan cage match.

Both parties have contributed to the Surveillance State. Both parties have expanded it. Both parties have exploited fear to convince the public that freedom must be sacrificed for safety.

The targets may change depending on who is in power, but the machinery remains.

Once the infrastructure exists, there is no guarantee that it will be used only against people you dislike or with whom you disagree politically.

That is the lesson Americans repeatedly refuse to learn.

A surveillance tool created by one administration will be inherited by the next. A database assembled for one purpose will inevitably be used for another. A system established to monitor “them” will eventually be turned against “us.”

Communities across the country are finally beginning to recognize the danger.

Some cities have terminated or declined to renew their Flock contracts. Others have paused deployments or demanded stronger restrictions on data sharing, retention and federal access.

This resistance is long overdue.

We cannot afford to become so distracted by the theater of politics that we fail to notice the architecture of tyranny being assembled around us.

The surveillance state does not care which party you support. It does not care whom you voted for.

It does not care whether you believe you have nothing to hide.

The cameras are watching. The databases are growing. The networks are connecting.

And as I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, unless we act now, there may soon be nowhere left to go without the government knowing exactly where we have been.

Read full story here…

Rarely has the Los Angeles Police Department found a police toy it doesn’t love. The third-largest police force in the US has major Palantir contracts in place, uses sketchy apps to track minority communities, and routinely sends drones to spy on peaceful protestors.

So when the LAPD ends a contract with a surveillance company because it thinks the technology is too dangerous, you know there’s a problem.

Over the weekend, the police department announced it was abandoning its contract with Flock Safety, the controversial company blanketing the United States in AI-integrated license plate cameras (ALPRs). Though its three-year contract with Flock is just about up, the LAPD says it won’t renew the partnership, citing residents’ concerns over privacy and civil rights, ABC reported.

“This contract is not being renewed because of serious concerns around civil liberties and civil rights issues, particularly around privacy and the data that is being collected from these cameras,” LAPD’s chief information officer Dean Gialamas told ABC in a statement. “The LAPD had to make a difficult decision, in this case discontinuing using Flock services until we can get those data, privacy, security and sharing concerns ironed out through a contractual relationship.”

The news comes just days after our sister publication The Drive‘s Joel Feder reported how he was suddenly swarmed by armed cops while test driving a Range Rover with his wife in Minnesota. Officers said they had been tracking him for days using Flock’s AI-integrated cameras, which had erroneously tagged his car as stolen.

After the latest Flock contract news broke, 404 Media revealed that a July 10 audit by the LAPD Office of the Inspector General caught the department’s ALPR cameras generating 161 false stolen-vehicle alerts in just two months — each one ending with officers pulling over an innocent driver. Factoring in 337 alerts which “resulted in the recovery of stolen vehicles,” the LAPD’s cameras carry an error rate of 32.3 percent, effectively giving officers a one-in-three chance at pulling an innocent person over.

“During the review period, officers acknowledged 161 alerts as accurate license plate matches; however, subsequent investigations determined the vehicles were not stolen,” the report reads. “In addition to creating an inconvenience for vehicle owners, these inaccuracies can affect individual liberty interests, erode public trust, and potentially create substantial legal and financial liability concerns.”

The OIG report notes that officers are required to “attempt to verify all records prior to conducting an investigative stop,” though it didn’t disclose how many of the 161 wrongful stops were the result of an officer’s failure to do so. Instead, investigators blamed license plate records it says were “not updated in a timely manner,” which “may” lead cops to “act on inaccurate or outdated information, increasing the risk of unnecessary enforcement actions, including vehicle stops and wrongful detentions, or a confrontation with serious consequences.”

As 404 flagged, the LAPD approaches potentially stolen vehicles as “high-risk” stops. For the LAPD, these stops require drastic shows of force, including “calling for back up, air support, and a supervisor and ordering the suspect out of their vehicle,” the report reads.

It doesn’t take a large language model to figure out that this is an incredibly dangerous scenario for Black people in Los Angeles, who account for 19.5 percent of those killed by the LAPD, despite making up only nine percent of the city’s population.

Whatever way you slice it, it seems one of the most notorious police departments in the US has finally met its match.

More on surveillance: Flock Cameras Screw Up, Swarm Innocent Man With Armed Police

The post LAPD Abandons Flock Contract After Making a Horrifying Discovery appeared first on Futurism.

Whenever big data center developers roll into town, their pitch ends up sounding something like this: hand over your land and your resources, throw in a decade of government subsidies, and we’ll give your ailing little burg some jobs, tax revenue, and a shiny new facility to boost the local economy.

Sounds like a no-brainer, right? Not so fast, cowboy.

In theory, more tax revenue means money for schools, roads, and first responders. In practice, states and counties are waving those taxes in order to entice tech companies to set up shop — while existing campuses put major strain on local communities. One analysis found that Georgia, Virginia, and Texas each lose over $1 billion a year to state data center incentives, while at least fourteen states don’t even disclose data center tax breaks in the first place.

The down-stream impacts don’t really materialize either. Researchers at Georgia Tech found that in rural areas, data centers typically employ fewer than 100 permanent workers and are likely to import specialized services from outside the community.

While this can temporarily boost unemployment numbers, any broader, long-term impacts are not guaranteed and are highly dependent on local conditions. As the Georgia Tech researchers explain, “the sweeping job and wage growth often promised during local recruitment efforts is unlikely to arrive on its own.”

But the jobs creation claim is where the pitch really falls apart. In Iowa, the Cedar Rapids Economic Development Center recently disclosed that two ongoing data center projects — one for Google carrying a price tag of at least $576 million and another for Blackstone firm QTS starting at $750 million — are contractually required to create a combined minimum of just 61 permanent jobs.

In other words, for $1.3 billion in combined capital coming into the city, Cedar Rapids is only guaranteed 61 permanent positions, a spend of $21.3 million per job. That’s even worse than the $136 million Ark Data Center going up in Northeastern Ohio, which is projected to create a whopping ten full-time jobs when all is said and done.

And while Cedar Rapids brags that these developments will bring “thousands of construction and trade jobs,” that may not be to the city’s benefit. Not only are data center construction jobs temporary — and therefore highly dependent on the whims of notoriously unreliable data center developers — they’re also putting quite the squeeze on the construction market.

As a recent analysis by the firm Turner & Townsend found, the rush to build so many data centers has created a “two-speed construction market,” where top-dollar AI projects drive up costs for other developments like housing, while sucking up the skilled labor needed in other sectors.

That report found that 87 percent of global construction markets are experiencing shortages of mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP) specialists, while the cost and lead-time of acquiring MEP components rises. That’s great news for MEP contractors, but the trade-off is higher costs for everything else we might want to build.

That’s before we even mention how disastrous data centers are for the environment — making it all the more insulting that taxpayers are forced to foot the bill for the tech industry’s vastly exaggerated promises.

More on data centers: The Pollution Being Churned Out by AI Data Centers Is So Severe That It’s Almost Incomprehensible

The post The Economics of Data Centers Creating Jobs Are So Bad That They Sound Like a Joke appeared first on Futurism.

Shares of Elon Musk’s SpaceX took another beating when trading resumed on Monday, sliding to an all-time low of just under $139, well below its IPO opening price of $150.

It’s now over 38 percent down from its all-time high of $225 three weeks ago, illustrating how rapidly the hype has inverted into widespread skepticism over Musk’s vision.

Following a blockbuster Wall Street debut, the space company has struggled to maintain any degree of momentum as investors continue to ask some very hard questions, including over its major pivot to orbital data centers and its near-term profitability. Despite being valued at almost two trillion dollars, the company lost nearly $5 billion last year.

Shares have hovered below the company’s opening price for weeks now, despite plenty of bullishness among analysts.

The news comes just days after Chinese state-run media showed a Long March 10B rocket booster being caught by an offshore recovery platform, indicating the country was making major strides in catching up with SpaceX’s reusable rocket tech. Over the weekend, an experimental Japanese reusable rocket safely took off and landed, suggesting the nation may be right behind China as well.

Beyond some steepening international space launch competition, experts believe SpaceX’s transformation into an “AI play” may be closely related to its Wall Street woes, as the BBC reports.

“Everyone saw SpaceX as an AI story,” CFRA investment research analyst Keith Snyder told the broadcaster.

“With Elon Musk, any company he touches gets people excited,” he added. “But this was also the first time people felt like they were able to invest in something that was being marketed as an AI play.”

How SpaceX will cover its enormous losses and start actually making some money — not to mention, prove that orbital data centers don’t just make sense but are even feasible to begin with — remains a major point of contention.

In short, the initial enthusiasm surrounding SpaceX’s IPO is firmly behind us.

“If you bought around the first tick you’re definitely underwater,” Snyder told the BBC. “It started to look a lot like a meme stock.”

“If you’re an IPO investor, you’re ok,” Mergermarket analyst Samuel Kerr added. “If you bought in the first few days, you’re not very happy right now.”

Investors remain sharply divided on where SpaceX shares are headed next. Many analysts from major investment banks remain bullish, expecting the stock to make massive gains. Case in point, Morgan Stanley believes the company will reach a price tag of $300 — far more than double its current stock price.

Snyder has a far more muted outlook, expecting SpaceX to fall down to just $115 a share.

Meanwhile, Musk has said he thinks “SpaceX will be worth more than the rest of Earth if we accomplish our goals,” a characteristically ambitious and perhaps delusional argument that assumes a lot of things will go right for the company.

Whether investors will buy into this lofty vision remains to be seen. Given its recent stock performance, it’s far from a guarantee.

“If SpaceX can do all the things it says it will do, yes, investors are sitting on the most valuable company ever,” Kerr told the BBC. “But it’s got a lot of work to do to get there.”

More on SpaceX: Elon Musk Says His Goal Is for SpaceX to Be Worth More than the Entire Earth

The post SpaceX Stock Plunges to All-Time Low After Competitor Makes Major Leap appeared first on Futurism.

Meta’s camera-equipped “AI Glasses” are so divisive that some adopters are now leaving their expensive smart glasses at home, as Engadget reports.

Influencers, mostly men, have been using the glasses to inconspicuously — and non-consensually — capture footage of themselves approaching women and attempting to hit on them, interactions they’ve then posted online for content. Some wearers have even attempted to extort victims of covert recordings for cash. That’s on top of serious allegations of alleged privacy breaches by Meta itself.

And then, of course, there’s the simple fact that a lot of people just really don’t like the idea of the world’s largest and most powerful social media giant, which has a history of misusing biometric information and other data, facilitating abuse and surveillance in this way — especially as Meta has taken highly controversial steps to infuse facial recognition capabilities into the tech.

The wearables have become so alienating that many people have taken to simply referring to the shades as “pervert glasses.”

In short, it’s no wonder some owners aren’t exactly thrilled to be seen in public while wearing them. Several of them told Engadget that while they were initially excited about the tech, misuse and allegations of privacy violations on behalf of Meta have made them hesitant to use their smart glasses outside of their own home.

“A lot of men and their behaviors have ruined this product,” a travel creator named Danielle told Engadget. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable around somebody wearing them, so I wouldn’t expect anybody to be comfortable around me wearing them, no matter where I am.”

“At this point,” she continued, “they’re like a fancy paper weight.”

Will Kujawa, a freelance video producer, told Engadget that he was “blown away” by the comment section when he posted online about thinking of buying a pair, and that the intensity of the response made him think twice.

“I saw all these comments about if you wear those glasses you’re basically a predator or a creep, and I was like, ‘Oh, maybe it’s not a good idea to have those,'” said Kujawa. “I didn’t really think that through all the way… there are a lot of times where it’s not appropriate to wear cameras on your face.”

Nonetheless, Meta’s smart glasses are vastly more popular than predecessors like Google Glass, and other tech giants are now racing to catch up. Despite the ongoing privacy lawsuit and glasses-enabled abuse, Meta recently launched a much-discussed new campaign with billionaire reality TV star Kylie Jenner. CEO Mark Zuckerberg remains convinced that smart glasses will eventually replace the smartphone.

Should sales continue to rise, the controversy surrounding Meta’s smart glasses is likely to deepen.

More on Meta glasses: Meta Lied About Its Smart Glasses Protecting User Privacy, New Class Action Lawsuit Claims

The post The Backlash Is So Strong That People With “Pervert Glasses” Are Afraid to Use Them in Public appeared first on Futurism.

Classes are going to look a little different for the University of Chicago’s first year law students.

On Thursday, the law school said it was banning the use of phones, tablets, and even laptops in class for freshman-level courses, as it rejigs its curriculum to be more “AI-resilient” and encourage more deliberate use of the tech.

An announcement from the school didn’t explicitly mention AI cheating. But the changes come amid a backdrop of significant public concern over generative AI’s impact on education, and plunging literacy and numeracy skills among students. 

“With AI disrupting higher education, our commitment to rigorous legal education also must mean openness to even rapid adaptation,” the statement said.

Device bans are not unusual in classrooms. Rarely, however, do they extend to laptops, and they’re typically enforced at an instructor’s discretion, rather than as a university-wide policy. The university claims the decision was made after both faculty and students reported positive effects after some professors experimented with device bans.

It’s just one of the few ways Chicago Law aims to tightly control how its students access AI tech. According to its new AI strategy statement, exams will be taken in-class without access to the internet and apps. Students will also have to take part in oral discussions with their professors about their research papers.

It’s far from a sweeping AI ban, however. The school still wants to prepare students for an AI-driven world, with the goal of steering them “toward using AI in ways that promote learning rather than inhibit it,” clinical professor Mark Templeton, who serves on Chicago Law’s AI Committee, said in a statement.

University figures, in fact, go to great pains to make clear they’re not shutting the door on AI completely.

“If you want to use AI as a study partner, if you want to use AI to ingest your notes from class and then create questions to quiz you on the material, that’s great,” said William Hubbard, a professor of law and economics and chair of the AI Committee, in the statement. “That’s not a shortcut. There are ways that using AI can strengthen the learning process and that’s what we’re trying to lean into.”

Major AI cheating scandals have already hit some of the country’s top institutions. A professor at Brown University recently uncovered a massive AI cheating ring in what might be the largest scandal of its kind in Ivy League history, suspecting that over half his students cheated on an exam using a chatbot. Princeton University recently dropped its over century-old Honor Code tradition by forcing students to be supervised to take their exams, as suspicion of AI cheating rattled the schools.

Chicago Law’s AI crackdown could also be seen as a response to the poor example set by the professionals in the practice. Countless lawyers have been admonished by judges after submitting court filings riddled with clear AI hallucinations, from references to made-up case law to mis-attributed quotes.

More on education: College Students Are Testing at the Level of 10-Year-Olds

The post Law School Bans Laptops and Phones as AI Cheating Scandal Grows appeared first on Futurism.

For many years now, child sexual abuse material (CSAM) has run rampant on Meta’s platforms. The Mark Zuckerberg-led company has been accused of trying to underplay the severity of the issue and even purposefully dismantle child safety guidelines.

And the situation is only getting worse. According to a shocking new BBC investigation, Instagram has been profiting off paid adverts that promote CSAM in India, a shocking revelation that highlights glaring holes in Meta’s efforts to get ahead of the problem.

Earlier this year, Meta announced it was trying to reduce its reliance on third party human moderators by — you guessed it — switching to AI. But considering the latest news, these systems are seemingly inadequate to stem a tidal wave of deeply disturbing content on its platforms.

Some of the incriminating ads reviewed by the BBC include terms like “rape video” and “child video” and link the platform’s users to shadowy Telegram channels, where the material can be bought for as little as $1.

The shocking revelation has sent shockwaves through the country’s government. Over the weekend, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology issued a notice to Meta, calling it to immediately disable all ads and content that promote the sale of CSAM. According to Indian broadcaster DD News, the ministry is giving Meta until July 11 to provide a “detailed explanation.”

After the BBC reached out to Meta for comment, the company claimed to have disabled several adverts and suspended any associated accounts for violating its policies. A Meta spokesperson argued that “no system is perfect, and our review process may not detect all policy violations.”

“We continue to run proactive detection technology on ads once they’re live, and anyone can report an ad to us that they think breaks our rules,” the spokesperson told the BBC.

Telegram also told the British broadcaster it had removed “more than 274,000 groups and channels related to child sexual abuse material in 2026.”

Former Facebook vice president Brian Boland argued that Instagram’s algorithms were designed to maximize profit.

“I think what’s sad and tragic is over time, the trade-off of revenue and user experience became a more core part of the conversation,” he told the BBC.

Boland testified against Meta in a trial that saw a New Mexico jury find the company guilty of misleading users over the safety of its platforms for children. The jury concluded in March that Meta had allowed the proliferation of CSAM, turning its platforms into marketplaces for child sex trafficking.

“Meta executives knew their products harmed children, disregarded warnings from their own employees, and lied to the public about what they knew,” said New Mexico’s attorney general Raúl Torrez in a statement at the time. “Today the jury joined families, educators, and child safety experts in saying enough is enough.”

With 1.9 million reports of CSAM on a leading tipline, India is only second to the United States. And children’s rights advocacy groups warn that plenty of crime is still falling through the cracks.

More on CSAM: While Meta Stuffs AI Into All Its Products, It’s Apparently Helpless to Stop Perverts on Instagram From Publicly Lusting Over Sexualized AI-Generated Children

The post Meta Caught Running Ads for Child Abuse appeared first on Futurism.

As tech companies go, the surveillance giant Palantir plays it looser than most. Specializing in deadly military targeting software and domestic police technology, Palantir isn’t afraid to lean into the reactionary, dystopian schtick.

That’s not an exaggeration. In a since-deleted post on X-formerly-Twitter, Palantir’s head of “strategic engagement” Eliano Younes shared an AI-generated propaganda video depicting the company logo surrounded by cult imagery, bloody crosses, and the grim reaper.

While the edgy ragebait is part-and-parcel of Palantir’s favored type of marketing material, the video evidently ruffled some feathers, exposing a deep cultural rift within one of the largest military tech firms in the world.

Speaking to the Financial Times, one former staffer explained that the incident caused the company to have an “absolute internal meltdown.”

Per the employee, a debate quickly overtook the company’s internal messaging channels, where workers reportedly expressed their outrage out in the open.

“You had people being like: ‘my customer is a children’s hospital — how am I supposed to explain this to them?'” the staffer recalled.

It’s not the first time the company’s leadership has alienated its rank and file. Earlier this year, Palantir workers registered their disgust with the company’s collaboration with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

After the murder of anti-ICE activists Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, one employee took to Palantir’s message boards to declare that “in my opinion ICE are the bad guys. I am not proud that the company I enjoy so much working for is part of this.”

Politically, it all reads a bit like Mordor’s orcs registering HR complaints about Sauron’s management style. The objection is noted, but you’re still helping the guy conquer Middle Earth; Palantir, after all, is named after a fictional orb in JRR Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” that corrupts anyone foolish enough to peer into it.

More on Palantir: “Televised Nervous Breakdown”: Palantir CEO Suffers a Bit of a Meltdown During Live Interview

The post Palantir Insiders Disgusted by Company’s Leadership appeared first on Futurism.

There’s a hot new phrase bouncing around police departments across the United States: “drone-as-first-responder.”

From small-town Indiana to New York City, cops around the country are embracing autonomous surveillance drones as the latest innovation in policing. While you might hear about the occasional puppy found in the woods with a police drone, those feel-good stories provide excellent cover for their true purposes: gathering intelligence on peaceful protests, surveilling minority communities, and intimidating activists.

Though drone-as-first-responder initiatives may not yet inspire the same knee-jerk opposition as Flock surveillance towers and data centers, fury is clearly growing as a more and more Americans are taking a stand against police drones.

In Minneapolis, residents are speaking out against the city police department’s plan to partner with Skydio, a private defense contractor that primarily manufactures drones for military forces. Concerned citizens packed a City Council meeting to discuss the initiative on Wednesday, filling both the main council hall and a back-up overflow room, CBS reported.

At the meeting, over 40 residents took the mic to explain that they don’t want Skydio drones — or any drones for that matter — in the Twin Cities.

“The deployment of autonomous surveillance drones rests on the presumption that the regular people unto themselves are existential threats,” one speaker exclaimed according to local station Fox9. “But if you accept and normalize that idea that every single person could be an existential threat, then you have already stripped your own residents of any inkling of humanity.”

The speaker continued, highlighting the fact that Minneapolis has a particularly grim history of police violence against Black people. “We need respect for our individuals and shared humanity,” they told city council members, “more relational work on the ground, not remote drones in the air.”

That movement in Minneapolis seems to be growing following weeks of organizing by local activists. Though Minneapolis appears to the be the main battleground for anti-police drone sentiment at the moment, similar concerns have been raised in Syracuse, Detroit, and Los Vegas. At Wednesday’s council meeting, some Twin Cities residents cast local opposition to police drones as one front in the national struggle over civil liberties.

One resident, for example, observed that “every” innovation in police technology is ripe for abuse, a conclusion shared by groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union.

“We watched [federal immigration officers] come in here with drones, we watched ICE come here and violate our constitutional rights,” the resident said. “Every technology given to state and federal law enforcement has been abused.”

More on drones: Wild Video Shows Quadcopter Drone Plucking Man From Raging Floodwaters, Whisking Him to Safety

The post Americans Are Raging About Autonomous Police Drones Swarming the Skies appeared first on Futurism.

So far, the narrative of AI in the workplace has had a consistent victim: the recent college grad, supposedly first on the chopping block as large language models automate the types of low level tasks that traditionally provided an on-ramp to office careers.

New evidence, however, suggests the tech may be impacting a surprisingly different segment of the workforce: those closest to retirement.

In a recent study by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, economics professor Geoffrey Sanzenbacher took a hard look at labor data in order to map AI’s impact on older workers in the United States. Comparing government job data against an AI-exposure index — a data set that tracks the degree to which certain occupations hinge on tasks that AI can do — Sanzenbacher compared the number of workers 55 and older leaving the workforce before and after the release of ChatGPT in 2022.

Though the researcher caveats that the “impact of AI on any workers, let alone those near retirement, remains an open question,” his findings point to an alarming shift. Prior to ChatGPT, older workers in the most AI-exposed jobs — highly-trained knowledge worker gigs like coding and tax preparation — were more likely to work later into their lives compared to those in manual labor.

“The types of jobs exposed to AI used to have a relative advantage with respect to career longevity,” Sanzenbacher explains. “In the post-ChatGPT era, the nearly offsetting bars for ‘not working’ suggest that this advantage has been greatly reduced, with a significant share of the increase due to unemployment.”

Though that general pattern still holds overall, Sanzenbacher observes that after the release of ChatGPT, the share of workers 55 and up leaving white collar work is surging. That’s not necessarily because folks are taking early retirements either; as Sanzenbacher writes, “after the ChatGPT launch… AI-exposed jobs saw relative increases in total transitions out of work and specifically to unemployment (but not out of the labor force).”

Said another way, growing numbers of older white collar workers are being pushed out of the airplane before they’re ready to jump, with little more than a blue Walmart vest as a parachute.

Like similar patterns observed around entry-level labor, this appears to be specifically impacting older white collar workers. Though the number of retirement-age workers leaving manual jobs like painting increased by about 2 percent between 2014 and 2025, that’s just a fraction of the number leaving high-exposed office jobs. For computer programmers, the number of exits rose by over 25 percent in the same period, while accountants and auditors saw a 22 percent increase.

It all points to an important question: if entry-level hiring has slowed to a crawl, and retirement-aged professionals are leaving in droves, how is the average worker supposed to navigate a labor market being squeezed from both ends?

More on AI and labor: Execs Confused and Horrified by the Huge AI Bills After Thinking They Could Replace Workers for Free

The post AI Is Pushing Older Employees Straight Out of the Workforce, New Report Finds appeared first on Futurism.

With each passing day without an AI labor revolution, the tech industry’s pricing scheme for AI is becoming more and more disconnected from reality — so much so that even its biggest clients are starting to revolt.

Speaking during an interview on CNBC‘s “Squawk on the Street” segment earlier this week, CEO of cybersecurity giant Palo Alto Networks Nikesh Arora implored the tech industry to lower the cost of AI.

During the segment, the chief executive argued that the cost to use large language models (LLMs) has to drop by 20 percent by 2027 — and 90 percent by 2028 — for the tech to be useful to enterprises.

“We need to see the pricing for AI come down,” Arora said.

Zooming out, Arora’s pleas for cheaper AI are instructive. For your average CEO, the ostensible value of any AI tool is in its ability to automate human workers and either slash payroll costs or keep them low — hence the trillions of dollars capitalists have poured into the industry.

There’s just one problem: AI, or more specifically, LLMs, can’t seem to make automation happen in an effective way, and some argue they never will. Instead, AI has largely become a tool to discipline labor, to squeeze more work out of every worker and keep margins high.

Unfortunately for the CEOs of the world, the rising cost of AI threatens to disrupt even this less-than-optimal arrangement.

Approaching the issue from the opposite end — though without the drama of a CEO experiencing buyer’s remorse — is tech critic Ed Zitron. In a separate interview with the same CNBC panel, Zitron argued that the AI industry is a “$10 to $30 billion [total addressable market] industry pretending to be a $1 trillion one.”

The critic’s diagnosis is essentially the same: the tech industry’s pricing assumes a level of AI demand and value creation that doesn’t exist. The difference between the two is that Arora needs that to change in order to justify his outrageous AI bill, forcing a confession in line with one of the tech industry’s fiercest critics.

More on AI: Companies That Embraced AI Are Now Rotting Away in a Very Specific Way

The post CEO Pleads With AI Industry to Stop Charging So Much to Replace Human Labor appeared first on Futurism.