What happens when you deploy hundreds of high-tech surveillance cameras against a student population known for their hacking skills? We’re about to find out.

This week, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s student newspaper the Tech reported that the university is about to spend over $3 million installing over 500 AI-integrated surveillance cameras across the school’s campus.

As the paper explains, the cameras will likely be able to collect real-time facial data, as well as more info related to object classification. Basically,that means it’ll be able to automatically identify, catalogue, and track the movement of physical items. That means people, yes, but also personal belongings like backpacks, boxes, vehicles, bags, and more.

While the cameras will surely be hooked into the MIT police department’s already-existing CCTV feed, the footage collected will also be automatically monitored by AI-RGUS, a firm which develops 24/7 surveillance monitoring software, the Tech reports.

As MIT spokesperson Kimberly Allen explained to the Tech, data will be “retained up to 30 days,” though exceptions will be granted.

Defending the cameras, Allen noted they’re “part of regular efforts to promote campus security,” adding that the camera’s audio surveillance features will be disabled, though that’s more a matter of state law than of any kind of principle on MIT’s part.

It’s an alarming move, coming after MIT faculty have warned that campus police are preemptively punishing students for speeches and protests outside of the established disciplinary process.

And as critics pointed out on social media, the $300 million project comes just a month after MIT administrators shuttered two campus libraries and reduced staffing at others, citing a major budget deficit. Though the news was first reported in December of 2025, those libraries were given a closing date of June 2026 — making the timing of the costly new surveillance dragnet highly suspect.

“Look on the bright side,” joked Syracuse University public relations professor Joshua Foust on Bluesky, “at least they also closed down libraries to save money for the AI cameras.”

More on surveillance: Flock Is in Serious Trouble After Massive Backlash

The post MIT Is Blanketing Its Entire Campus in AI-Powered Security Cameras appeared first on Futurism.

To play, click or drag one or more tiles to move them into the empty space. Repeat until you have reconstructed the image.

Image courtesy: iStock/vasantytf; iStock/extravagantni

Fancy some more? Check out our puzzles page.

The post The science of being ‘cultured’: a slide puzzle appeared first on Physics World.

The New York Times recently published a 124-page special issue of its Style Magazine entitled “How to be cultured”. According to the cover of this glossy, ad-driven supplement, the contents were “idiosyncratic” but amounted to a “compendium of what you need to know right now”. The material had been “chosen by experts” for the purpose of “teaching readers how to be more cultured”.

Curious as to what would be included, my hopes were raised by the magazine’s lead editorial. It said that the issue “celebrates expertise, a quality ever less valued in our culture today, where learnedness and firsthand research can be overshadowed by slick presentation and dumb certainty”.

Now, I’m not naïve. I know that the New York Times Style Magazine caters to advertisers, who in turn cater to wealthy readers who feel the need to spend gobs of money to get culture. It didn’t therefore surprise me to have to leaf through 40 pages of adverts for jewellery, champagne, watches and home furnishings before finally coming across the table of contents.

I saw headings for film, food, music, theatre, fashion and the visual arts. Shakespeare showed up several times: over half a dozen plays, sonnet #94 and one of his monologues. There were entries for 1930s movies, animated videos and films from Brazil. One page on food and drink covered porridge from Norway, meat from Mexico, lemonade from Vietnam and wine from Austria.

There was no mention of science in “How to be cultured”, nothing at all

Novels from the US, UK, France, Japan, India and Brazil made the list, as did selections of music from medieval times to opera and hip-hop. Samples of theatre, puppetry and architecture made it in too. But there was no mention of science, nothing at all. The closest I found were architectural materials such as plaster, glass, steel and textiles.

Snow’s lament

The absence of anything scientific should not have shocked me; in fact, it reminded me of the British scientist and novelist C P Snow’s 1959 essay The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Even back then, Snow lamented that humanists and scientists were living in two separate cultures divided by a “gulf of mutual incomprehension”.

In the essay’s most famous passage, Snow wrote that “a good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists”.

“Once or twice,” he went on, “I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of ‘Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?’”

Snow did not stop there. “I now believe,” he continued, “that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, ‘What do you mean by mass, or acceleration’, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language.”

“So the great edifice of modern physics goes up,” he concluded, “and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.”

Culture club

Snow’s tone was snobby and arrogant, but he was on to something. Can someone who knows nothing about, say, Einstein’s equation E = mc² or about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle really be called cultured? Sure, cultured individuals don’t need to know much about these topics. But they ought at least to realize that those equations concern how mass and energy work and the inherent limitations to what humans can know.

I’d say those are principles fundamental to the formation, maintenance and fate of the universe – and ones that a cultured person ought to know something about. Indeed, references to them are routinely found in arts and popular culture. Einstein’s equation has made the cover of Time magazine, while the uncertainty principle has been taken up by novelists, theologians and comedians.

Shouldn’t a cultured person be acquainted in some way with the existential threats facing the world?

Further, shouldn’t a cultured person be acquainted in some way with the existential threats facing the world? Wouldn’t such a person have to have an inkling of the way a carbon molecule absorbs and emits heat, of how vaccines work, and of safe and unsafe levels of substances toxic in high doses? How cultivated can an ostrich be?

Of course, there was nothing about the second law in “How to be cultured”, or about any other science of the sort Snow had in mind.

Nothing about scientific equations, experiments, theories or facts that a cultured person ought to know.

No discussion of dark matter, dark energy or of quantum physics, genes or vaccines. Nor about the Pythagorean Theorem or the double-slit experiment.

The critical point

Culture refers to the influences and values that are embedded in the way we live. Judging such influences and values – deciding which influences and values ought to be so embedded – is a tempting but arrogant game.

So let’s play. Imagine that you are among the experts charged with compiling a “compendium of what you need to know right now”. What would you include of science – and why? Send me your contributions, and tell me why they are what we need to know, and I’ll write about them in a future column.

The post Tell us what science you need to know to be ‘cultured’ appeared first on Physics World.

Demons might be mythical, but for hundreds of years these imaginary creatures have been fantastically useful for thinking about science and the humanities. For physicists, the most famous demon was dreamed up by James Clerk Maxwell in 1867. His creature appeared to violate the second law of thermodynamics by letting hot molecules in a box of gas go in one direction through a trap door, leaving cold molecules behind.

Inspired by the rich history of demons, my Stony Brook University colleague Elyse Graham and I created what we believe is the first university course that both studies demons and teaches students to code them. We taught the course, entitled “Demons to think with”, for the first time in spring 2025 and again in spring 2026, each time to almost 100 students. The course proved to be a great way of getting students in the humanities and sciences to talk to, work with, and learn from each other.

We surveyed demons from ancient times to the present and discussed their presence throughout art, literature and religion, where they prey on human vulnerabilities to steal souls. We also taught students about what computer engineers call “daemons”, whose malicious members prey on human vulnerabilities via clickbait and other temptations to steal passwords and social-security numbers. But what struck Graham and me most was the sheer number, variety and ambition of scientifically informed demons.

Fictional and frictional

One species was what we might call one-off demons, which explain puzzles about a specific phenomenon. Back in the early 1950s, explanations that rely on this kind of demon were parodied by the American psychologist Wendell Johnson in his 1946 book People in Quandaries: the Semantics of Personal Adjustment.

Once upon a time, Johnson wrote, people were puzzled by the fact that they could rarely find a lead pencil when they needed one – and when they did, its sharpener was sure to be filled with pencil shavings. A committee was appointed to develop a theory to explain this conundrum.

According to this made-up theory, there are lots of little people called plogglies who live underground. “At night, when people are asleep,” Johnson wrote, “the plogglies come into their houses. They scurry around and gather up all the lead pencils, and then they scamper over to the pencil sharpener and grind them all up. And then they go back into the ground.”

Even though it was impossible to know when, where and on what the plogglies will act, Johnson pointed out, this was a brilliant theory as it accounted for two mysteries at once.

Another species of demon comprises law-governed demons. The Princeton University physicist Eric Rogers gave an example in his 1960 book Physics for the Inquiring Mind. Demons cause friction, in this explanation, because they “stand in front of things and push to stop them from moving”. These demons are transparent and too small to see, and the more demons there are, the greater the friction.

Oil reduces friction because it drowns the demons, while heavy objects crush their bones. The laws of friction spring from the fact that the demons have strict habits in the way they rush out of the pores of a surface and get crushed or drowned, and multiply and return to duty at a steady rate.

Law-governed demons play what I think of as a metaphysical role, for they explain the agency behind the regularities of a phenomenon in a way that can be divorced from the regularities themselves. Scientists can study and apply the laws of friction, for example, independently of the demons that cause it. The laws can be studied in what philosophers call the “immanent frame”, apart from whatever transcendent features are involved in putting them in that frame. That lets philosophers and scientists go their separate ways.

Stand-ins and tutors

A third category of demons are what we might call placeholder demons. In 1959 the US physicist David Pines proposed the existence of a massless, chargeless quasiparticle that is an out-of-phase collective excitation of electrons. With a nod to Maxwell, he named it Pines’ demon, reinforcing the term with an improvised acronym (Distinct Electron Motion + on).

Back in 2023 a team of researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign discovered the particle – a kind of plasmon – using specialized electron spectroscopy in strontium ruthenate. Pines’ creature was a placeholder demon because it simply gave a name for something that we know is lurking in the immanent frame and only have to find it.

The emergence of quantum physics at the start of the 20th century spawned a new generation of instructional demons

Physicists, finally, use instructional demons. Its most famous member is Maxwell’s demon, mentioned at the beginning of this article. Even a century and a half later it still teaches theorists about the intersection of energy, entropy and information. But the emergence of quantum physics at the start of the 20th century spawned a new generation of instructional demons, including two from Nobel-prize-winning physicists.

In 1911 Marie Curie wondered about a demon that could manipulate quantized packets of energy, while in 1935 Arthur Compton imagined a demon that could open a door for “good” photons and slam the door on “bad” photons that might trigger a stick of dynamite. Working out how far these demons could get – whether law-abiding, law-breaking or law-bending – teaches physicists much about the intersection of information, entropy and quantum mechanics. Instructional demons teach theorists not so much about pieces of the immanent frame as about the structure of the frame itself.

The critical point

As the science historian Jimena Canales showed in her 2020 book Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science, demons inhabit even the most methodical and evidence-based thinking. Scientific demons are like other kinds of demons in that they are wily supernatural creatures with superhuman powers. They are unlike other kinds of demons, however, in that they don’t try to take advantage of human vulnerabilities to change us but try to take advantage of nature’s vulnerabilities to change it.

Postulating demons with supernatural powers is a way that scientists have used to explore nature. Studying scientific demons therefore not only tells us about nature but scientific thinking itself.

• If you enjoyed this article, give our demon cryptic crossword a go.

The post Meet the demons: four mythical creatures that inhabit science appeared first on Physics World.

Displayed in a sealed case at the National Archives Museum in Washington DC, the US Declaration of Independence is – alongside the Constitution, the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address – one of America’s most sacred documents. Just a single sheet of parchment, it was signed on 4 July 1776 by 56 representatives of 13 colonies, declaring themselves free of British rule. Even though years of fighting followed and Britain did not officially recognize the colonies’ independence until 1783, America dates its birth to that signing.

For many American citizens, the Declaration of Independence is greatly revered. I remember my grandfather had a copy mounted in the entryway to his home, and when I was 10 years old offered me $1 if I memorized it. I had no trouble with the start, for the document’s first sentence is arresting. “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another”, decency requires that “they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation”.

The second sentence is equally exhilarating and unforgettable: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”.  I didn’t discover until years later that this evidently didn’t include women, slaves, or the people referred to as “merciless Indian Savages”. Four truths later, the signatories zoomed in. When a government destroys “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” it is the “Right of the People to alter or abolish it”.

King George III was doing just that, they claimed, and the signatories followed with a laundry list of appalling grievances that amounted to tyranny. These included: obstructing justice, bending judges to his will, sending agents to harass and murder people, giving amnesty to those agents, transporting people overseas, cutting off trade with the rest of the world, making the military responsive to himself alone, and on and on.

Current US president Donald Trump claims that the Declaration of Independence led to “the greatest political journey in human history”. The document, he adds, set an example for the world. “The Story of America Makes Everyone Free,” he writes on an official website that has been counting down the days, hours, minutes and seconds to the 250th anniversary of the signing.

Destroyers of Earth

The enormous attention that the US administration is paying to this anniversary has made me wonder, however, whether a government today could destroy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness badly enough to make it necessary to alter or abolish it. The answer was staring me in the face. What if it destroyed science enough to make citizens vulnerable to natural threats?

I’ve therefore been trying to imagine a revised declaration. Among the self-evident truths, I think, is that human beings are endowed with the right to protection against nature, that the purpose of science is to understand nature and its threats, and that a sovereign’s duty is therefore to foster science and act appropriately on its findings. A no-brainer, right?

These truths are more important than ever in the 21st century, I envision the document saying. Until recently in human history, nature could be treated as an inert stage for human activity. But human activity can now interact with nature in a destructive way to threaten human life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

We experience such destruction in the degradation of the Earth’s atmosphere, in rising sea levels, in the spread of infectious diseases, in the increasing pollution of land, sea and air, and in coastal floods and water shortages. The current US administration, I’d continue, is not only doing nothing to prevent this destruction, but also actively campaigning against people who are fighting it and trying to make the world safer.

Human freedom and independence require developing science to understand and cope with nature’s threats. When science is ignored, nature rules

The administration claims that stopping these attempts increases the freedom of US citizens. It does not, however, and instead enslaves us to nature. Human freedom and independence require developing science to understand and cope with nature’s threats. When science is ignored, nature rules.

Yet the current US sovereign, a wannabe King, has made unprecedented attacks on science. His ignorance, denials and repudiations have unleashed untold damage and destruction to the health, welfare and safety of citizens. His actions threaten not only our lives but human lives elsewhere. His actions even threaten the global conditions that make human life possible at all.

Our grievances

My revised declaration would follow with a long and easily verifiable list of modern-day grievances. These would include the fact that Trump has declared that threats whose existence is scientifically well-established are hoaxes, scams and have “no basis in fact”. He has prevented agencies from investigating these threats and from developing technologies to use against them.

He has fired people who study these threats and installed political appointees to oversee funding of research. Despite publicly denying and ridiculing findings about climate change and rising seas, he has admitted their truth when it comes to protecting his own golf course.

The US administration has also declared, contrary to scientific findings, that claims of outbreaks of disease have been “fabricated” and that vaccines do not work. It has cancelled grants to develop vaccines, attacked vaccine makers, revoked recommendations that children be vaccinated, fired experts in vaccines, and damaged the process of vaccine development.

The US administration has sought to gut or close the most important US science agencies. He has withdrawn the US from international agencies that track and address the most important threats to human life and health. He has invented false facts about nature and forced US agencies to agree with him. And he has damaged and extorted America’s top universities by trying to dictate their research, hiring, admissions, courses and curricula.

The critical point

My document would reach a rousing conclusion.

A people, it would say, are only truly free and independent when they and their offspring are able to live in a safe environment, not stalked by disease, and educated freely without government interference. A sovereign who ignores and damages science is unfit to be a ruler by exposing the people to the enslavement of nature. Citizens in a democracy have the right to a leader who does not enslave them to nature.

The final sentence of the document would be: “Let us take those rights back.”

Like the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago, my imagined one may seem revolutionary but only expresses what Thomas Jefferson, the author of the original, called “the common sense of the subject.”

The post What a modern-day US Declaration of Independence should say appeared first on Physics World.

Artificial intelligence may not deliver on its promise of vast economic opportunity at a price that humanity is willing to pay

In March, Anthropic, the cutting-edge artificial intelligence business that gave us the chatbot Claude, published an analysis on the impact of AI on employment, to help us assess the claim that intelligent robots were about to redefine human existence, ending demand for human labor.

Last year in May, Anthropic’s co-founder, Dario Amodei, claimed AI could wipe out half of all entry-level jobs in one to five years. Last January, he told us AI would probably become a “general labor substitute for humans”. In June he said we risk “a world where the economic trade-off dial is stuck on the hypergrowth, hyper-inequality setting”.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: DragonImages/Getty Images

© Photograph: DragonImages/Getty Images

© Photograph: DragonImages/Getty Images

Who could’ve guessed that students who use AI to cheat on their assignments are incredibly lazy?

Jason Gibson, a history professor at Alcorn State University in Mississippi, says that he used white font to hide a prompt telling an AI model to spew nonsense in the instructions for his mid-term.

Unfortunately, it ended up working a little too well.

“Thirty-two of my 35 students between two classes failed a portion of their midterm because they all used AI to generate their entire response,” he explained in a viral TikTok, sounding incredulous. “And apparently they didn’t proofread it.”

The hidden prompt told the AI to sneak in random digressions about Madagascar. The midterm, by the way, was about the Industrial Revolution. And apparently none of the indolent cheats put in the bare modicum of effort required to at least check if what the AI wrote made any sense at all. All they did was copy-paste the midterm instructions into a chatbot, then copy-paste the chatbot’s spiel back into the answer window.

Gibson shared some of the most examples in a follow-up video. After introducing how AI and other technologies have impacted society, for instance, one midterm included this puzzling non sequitur: “Madagascar floats sideways through the afternoon.” (“Okay,” Gibson says, after a pause.)

Another droned on about something related to AI and social inequality, followed by: “Madagascar purple bicycle whispers to the ceiling.”

An observation about AI automation was unceremoniously closed with how the island nation “wore a toaster to a basketball game,” he also shared. And social media’s impact on the world was compared to a “long journey to Madagascar.”

Gibson makes it clear that humiliating his students wasn’t the point. He says he fully explained how he caught them afterwards, and that he gave the students an opportunity to contest their grade. (Only two did, showing at least that they do feel shame.) 

“I get no gratification out of seeing students fail. It’s not my intent to see you fail — that’s weird,” he said.

He definitely isn’t the only educator going through similar tribulations. Teachers and professors across the country are constantly complaining that their pupils are using AI to generate essays and cheat on tests. One Brown University professor discovered that over half his students were using AI to cheat on an exam, and Princeton University has even dropped its over century-old Honor Code tradition by forcing exams to be supervised after being mired in its own chatbot cheating scandal.

“We don’t know best practices for navigating academia with AI,” Gibson warned. “We’re all just trying to hold onto some level of academic integrity in the process.”

More on AI: Law School Bans Laptops and Phones as AI Cheating Scandal Grows

The post Professor Hides White Font in Midterm, Catches Students Using AI in the Stupidest Way Possible appeared first on Futurism.

For years, the conventional wisdom for ambitious students and languishing jobseekers alike was “learn to code.” Do that, the ubiquitous advice went, and you’d be able to find yourself a six-figure job anywhere.

But in an age when bosses are hellbent on using powerful AI agents to perform the duties of software engineers, that advice is now looking increasingly obsolete, if not outright backfiring. And the youngsters appear to be getting wise to that new reality.

For the first time in nearly twenty years, computer science enrollment declined during the 2025-26 academic year, according to new research from the Stanford economist Jacob Light reported by Business Insider.

A separate survey from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center found that undergraduate enrollment in another IT degree, computer and information sciences and support services, dropped by a precipitous 8.1 percent in the fall of 2025.

Light said that the dropoff could be related to AI, and not necessarily a direct result of AI taking over coding jobs.

“The decline could reflect changes in the education production function as generative AI alters how students complete coursework, changes in students’ expectations about the returns to Computer Science skills, responses to labor market conditions that themselves partly reflect AI adoption, broader weakness in the technology labor market unrelated to AI, or other contemporaneous shifts in student demand,” Light wrote, per BI.

“Therefore, I treat the enrollment patterns as descriptive evidence rather than as an estimate of the causal effect of ChatGPT or AI exposure on student demand,” he concluded.

There’s probably nuance under the hood. When The Washington Post dived into the National Student Clearinghouse data earlier this year, its analysis suggested that some of those disappearing computer science enrollments are being funneled into related disciplines instead, like data analytics and data science.

In any case, it’s clear that programming jobs, at least in big tech, aren’t as secure as they used to be. Over 120,000 tech jobs have been cut in 2026 so far, according to the industry layoffs trackers Layoffs.fyi. A significant portion came at companies like Meta and Google as they ramped up their AI spending.

One report found that AI was cited in the announcements of more than 54,000 layoffs last year. Whether AI meaningfully replaced those jobs or was simply used as a scapegoat by employers to gloss over other reasons for the cuts, though, is a matter of ongoing debate.

More on AI: Sixteen Nobel-Winning Economists Warn That Major AI Job Losses Are Coming

The post Computer Science Enrollment Now Declining Under Dark Cloud of AI appeared first on Futurism.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is many different things to many different people — but one thing that it definitely isn’t is a get-rich-quick scheme.

Since its debut on the public tickers back in early June, SpaceX shares have sunk from a high of over $225 to a dismal $110 today, as compounding failures and overvaluation fears take their toll. Overall, SpaceX is down nearly 30 percent compared to its opening stock price of $150 — and all those day-one rubes are now seeing red.

“Elon has ruined me,” one Redditor posted on r/WallStreetBets, along with a screenshot showing a loss of nearly $455,000 CAD on thousands of SpaceX shares. “He was supposed to take us to Mars and burn short sellers. Still holding 7300 shares. Please Elon fly again.”

On Musk’s X-formerly-Twitter, investor’s spirits, like his rockets, weren’t any higher.

Under a post showing off SpaceX’s Starship at sunset, dejected Musk acolytes moped about their fortunes, begging the company to get its act together.

“It sure would be cool if this stops crashing… 30 percent short interest and down 40 percent on the month,” one fanboy groused. “I believed in you and lost over 20k in a month. I really hope that it comes back.”

On Thursday, when SpaceX announced it was delaying the launch of Starship’s thirteenth test flight by a day, commenters were quick to point out that the update came just minutes after US stock markets closed. (The stock continued sinking the next day, falling more than another 3 percent by press time.)

“Notice they wait until market close now,” one poster quipped.

“Sure,” said another user, “wait till market close to announce…lol…as if we didn’t know what the weather was going to do hrs in advance.”

With that major test now scheduled for Friday evening, it remains to be seen whether a successful test will be enough to win back investors. On the flipside, a high-profile failure now could severely compound the company’s woes, putting SpaceX even further from the $2 trillion valuation Musk has promised. Time will tell.

More on SpaceX: China Is Catching Up With SpaceX Fast, Landing First Reusable Rocket Booster on Offshore Platform

The post SpaceX Investors in Meltdown Over All the Money They’ve Lost appeared first on Futurism.

Another glowing red indicator just lit up on the control panel steering the US economy: short sellers have placed a nearly unprecedented magnitude of bets against the domestic stock market.

A new analysis by the firm S3 Partners has found that short interest in the S&P 500 is now the highest it’s been since the company began compiling that data in 2010, Business Insider reports. In all, S3 found that roughly 3.7 percent of the S&P’s free float — meaning the total market value of shares available to the public for trading — is now tied up in short interest.

That’s a significant number, almost double the short interest in the S&P at the same time last year. For context, BI notes that roughly 3.8 percent of the S&P was hedged against itself right before the 2008 financial crisis, adding to a growing number of data points suggesting the economy is due for a major reckoning.

Stripping it down to plain English, this is a glaring indication that institutional investors are trying to get ahead of the AI financial bubble, which accounts for roughly 60 percent of the index’s growth since April. And the fact that a growing number of investors aren’t just exiting positions, but are actively betting against the US stock market is a massive tell.

For years, a few brave economists and financial analysts have pointed to the fact that the amount of money being spent on AI continues to rise as evidence that the AI bubble is unsustainable.

The thing is, investors are fine with rising costs if there’s enough revenue coming in to justify the spending, which for AI development has already eclipsed $1.6 trillion as of 2026. But whether we’re looking at data centers, digital ad revenue, or the cost of inference, the kind of revenue growth needed simply isn’t there, as the leading tech companies play an increasingly expensive game of kick-the-can-down-the-road.

This is the situation that has investors — and plenty of regular people — nervous about the AI financial bubble. A perfect example can be found in Google’s parent company Alphabet, which reported its first quarter of negative free cash flow this week. The company likewise raised its capital expenditure expectations by a cool $5 to $25 billion, CNBC reported, sending investors running for the hills as the long-promised AI revolution remains a world away.

More on the AI bubble: SoftBank CEO Says You’re Too Stupid to Understand What’s Going on If You Believe the AI Bubble Is Real

The post Investors Laying Groundwork to Profit Massively When Economy Collapses appeared first on Futurism.

On Wednesday, an a pro-privacy account called “Orwell Day” shared a video on X-formerly-Twitter of a man discovering a Flock license plate reader embedded inside an otherwise innocent roadside speedometer. Operated by the local Sheriff’s department, the device was cleverly hidden to be undetectable to approaching road and pedestrian traffic.

“What lurks on the back of it?” the man behind the camera asks as he approaches the device. “Look at that. Someone did some custom metal fabricating and decided to put a Flock camera, a mobile one, anywhere they want to put it, in the speedometer.”

They are hiding Flock cameras now, secret compartment found in speed radar box pic.twitter.com/4kkeRsKufi

— Orwell Day (@OrwellDay) July 22, 2026

That particular unit is operated by police in Volusia County, Florida, encompassing the suburbs north of Orlando. However, it’s not unthinkable that the practice might spread to other locales as the public backlash against ALPRs grows — and it’s growing fast.

So far, the privacy advocates behind the website DeFlock.org note that 53 US cities have ended their previous ALPR contracts with Flock. (Some municipalities are turning to alternative ALPR providers like Axon.)

In cities where local leaders aren’t ready to cut the cord, however, citizens are taking matters into their own hands, sawing down Flock towers, sabotaging their solar charging panels, or paint bombing the camera’s sensors.

While that kind of direct action has forced some municipalities to reconsider their Flock contracts, others are doubling down. Now, it seems some towns are getting crafty, secreting the now-infamous surveillance devices in roadside objects to throw saboteurs off their trail.

It’s not without precedent. In 2025, the Associated Press reported that US Border Patrol officers were hiding ALPRs and other surveillance devices inside traffic barrels, allowing them to monitor thousands of drivers throughout the US for “suspicious travel patterns.”

As the AP reported at the time, the program encompassed states like Arizona, Texas, and Michigan. In many cases, hidden cameras were discovered in locations that were hundreds of miles away from the nearest border.

At the moment, the full scope of covert ALPRs in the US remains to be uncovered. But with over 95,000 of the spy gadgets and counting deployed across the country, the number of hidden cameras is surely much higher than the public is currently aware.

More on Flock: LAPD Abandons Flock Contract After Making a Horrifying Discovery

The post So Many People Are Smashing Flock’s Cameras That It’s Disguising Them Inside Other Objects appeared first on Futurism.

While the rest of us were busy rooting against Argentina, suspicious things were afoot on gambling markets related to the World Cup.

The Group of Copenhagen, an international sports integrity body, has flagged seven suspicious bets on platforms including Polymarket, which it says could be related to match manipulation.

The full report hasn’t been released yet. But sources told The Athletic that some of the bets that raised “irregularities” include the nearly $4.8 million placed on Polymarket for Spain not to defeat Cape Verde in their group stage match-up. The game ended in a goalless draw, in one of the first major shocks of the tournament.

Another Polymarket bet that raised suspicion was “Will Folarin Balogun play against Belgium?” which was opened on the same day, July 2, that the US striker received a red card against Bosnia and Herzegovina.

A red card means a player is suspended for at least one game, and the Belgium matchup was the US’s next. In a now-scandalous twist, FIFA’s Disciplinary Committee made the unprecedented move of suspending Balogun’s suspension, allowing him to play the next game. 

This wasn’t announced until July 5 — and it soon came to light that the decision was made after US president Trump personally called FIFA president Gianni Infantino to complain about the red card; later, Trump praised the deferral of Balogun’s ban as a “great decision.”

Heightening the suspicions, sources told The Athletic that the Group of Copenhagen report found no other markets like the one opened for Balogun were opened for any of the other 14 players who were shown a red card during the World Cup.

FIFA’s own Integrity Task Force, however, doesn’t see any signs of nefarious activity. In a report published Tuesday, it concluded there was “no suspicious betting activity or indications of match manipulation in connection with any fixture,” per The Athletic.

The Group of Copenhagen, by contrast, said it’s found seven “yellow notices” in bets related to the World Cup, which it explains are flagged for reasons including “unexplained fluctuations in odds, rumours on social media or source information.” (Yellow notice ranks below orange and red, the highest level of notice.)

Right now, no specific allegations are being made. But the Balogun bet could be seen as a sign of insider trading. The Trump administration has already been hit with several similar scandals related to prediction markets, including a White House teleprompter who’s being investigated for allegedly making over $100,000 by placing bets on Kalshi related to Trump’s speeches.

It’s possible that the Group of Copenhagen is flagging the bets for reasons other than manipulation, according to Christian Kalb, a gambling industry expert who formerly worked with the organization. Instead, it could be because platforms like Polymarket are being used by hedging markets, as what might be the case with the bets placed over the Spain versus Cape Verde match.

“If you are a traditional bookmaker, there will be matches when everyone bets on a very strong favourite to win. So maybe, from a bookmaker’s perspective, there are too many people betting on this outcome,” Kalb told The Athletic. “If they are a small company, this may be a risk: so they could use a prediction market like Polymarket to hedge that risk.”

More on gambling: A New Type of Gambling Scandal Is Sweeping Through Sports

The post Suspicious Bets on Polymarket Suggest Something Fishy Was Happening During the World Cup appeared first on Futurism.

The underlying cause of real price inflation is linked to the expansion of the US Federal Reserve's M2 money supply, rather than conventional measures like the CPI. Gold and silver remain more reliable investments compared to fiat currencies, which inevitably devalue to zero over time.

Last week, SpaceX’s enormous Starship rocket failed to ignite several of its engines, forcing the company to abort its first test launch since its IPO earlier this summer.

The scrub served as the perfect metaphor for the space company’s ongoing struggles to convince investors of CEO Elon Musk’s lofty ambitions — ambitions which have little to no chance of turning into a reality without Starship.

While the almost-trillionaire has promised that SpaceX will one day be worth “more than the rest of the Earth,” its prolonged decline on the stock market suggests otherwise. Instead of joining the AI race, SpaceX has resorted to selling compute to its competitors.

His EV maker Tesla, an early pioneer in the adoption of electric vehicles, has also been flailing. Vehicle sales have been plunging as customers are driven away by the richest man in the world’s tasteless behavior and erratic commentary. Even recent jumps in revenue were thwarted by major AI-related spending, causing Tesla’s share price to tank this week.

As a result of it all, Musk’s empire feels more like it’s coming down around him — making it a perfectly convenient moment for him to sit down with The Economist for an attempt at a clean slate. (Whether it landed we’ll leave to you to decide.)

In the interview, published Thursday, Musk lamented that he “got a little too involved in politics” and “got carried away, frankly,” by his efforts to systematically gut the government with the help of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency during the early days of the second Trump administration.

The scars DOGE leaves behind are as evident now as they’ve ever been. Instead of cutting spending, the group forced tens of thousands of government workers out of their jobs, laid waste to foreign aid — with catastrophic consequences — and leaked highly sensitive data. It has sparked waves of protests, hollowed out the Social Security Administration, and fundamentally undermined the role of science in the United States.

Perhaps worst of all to Musk, his disastrous stint as a “special employee” in Washington, DC, last year has made him staggeringly unpopular — possibly even one of the most hated men in America.

“And I got a lot of flack from this, for this obviously,” he conceded in the Economist interview.

Now that his empire is looking worse for wear, it’s no wonder Musk is looking for an opportunity to tell the public that he’s moved on from helping the Trump administration dismantle the government.

But whether he actually regrets his actions is unclear at best. During the interview, Musk showed “no sign of relinquishing the geopolitical bully pulpit,” per The Economist. He doubled down on accusing the media of wrongfully characterizing him as a racist, despite repeatedly making racist comments. He even argued that Europe’s far-right extremist leaders were simply misunderstood.

In an piece accompanying its interview, The Economist acknowledged it sees the centibillionaire’s political views as “plainly bigoted.”

Musk also promised that AI will make money irrelevant — an “age of amazing abundance,” he enthused — and that governments should simply “issue people checks.” Considering his actions at the helm of DOGE last year, it’s clear he sees little role for the government beyond that.

More on Musk and DOGE: Elon Musk Says He Is So Sorry for His Horrible Behavior

The post Suddenly, as His Empire Crumbles, Elon Musk Admits He Made a Huge Mistake With DOGE appeared first on Futurism.

A few millennia ago, people worldwide may have spoken or signed up to 10 times as many languages as they do today.

Shares of Elon Musk’s embattled carmaker Tesla slid over 13 percent Thursday morning after posting dismal second quarter results the night before.

The stock is hovering at around $324 at the time of writing, down over 15 percent over the last five days and about 28 percent year to date.

The company missed Wall Street expectations, despite its core automotive segment generating just over $20 billion in revenue, up 23 percent from a year ago. However, the company’s gross profits dropped as operating expenses climbed far quicker than revenue, in large part thanks to AI-related capital expenses and other research and development — an intimately familiar refrain for the tech world in 2026.

In other words, investors are growing increasingly wary of Musk’s reinvention of his car business. The almost-trillionaire is trying to shift the company’s focus from selling cars to robotaxis, a humanoid robot called Optimus, and AI — a series of major undertakings that’re clearly weighing it down financially after multiple quarters of major losses.

Worse yet, Tesla’s woes are clearly having knock-on effects on his rocket company as well. SpaceX’s stock has had a bruising month since hitting an all-time high after going public in mid-June. An aborted Starship test launch and Musk’s dubious plan for orbital data centers have investors betting against the company in incredible numbers.

During Wednesday’s earnings call, the company claimed that production of its Optimus humanoid robot remains on track, but didn’t elaborate beyond promising that production is starting “soon.”

“This is going to be the hardest product to scale manufacturing that we’ve ever made at Tesla, because everything on the robot is new,” Musk said.

Tesla’s robotaxi service is also being rolled out to six major metropolitan areas across the country, but continues to lag far behind its key competitor, Alphabet’s Waymo.

Despite slightly more optimistic vehicle sales numbers, the company continues to burn through billions of dollars to keep all of those new plates spinning.

The elephant in the room during this week’s call was the long-rumored possibility of Musk merging Tesla and SpaceX — a doubling down on his portfolio that could set up some of the most unbelievable financial drama in economic history.

The mercurial entrepreneur didn’t rule out the possibility, saying that “we can’t talk about combining companies on an earnings call.”

“It’s got to be done with the appropriate process,” he added.

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

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Shares of Elon Musk’s SpaceX are continuing their weeks-long decline, hitting a new all-time low of around $115 by Wednesday afternoon.

The scale of the accumulating losses since the company’s hotly-anticipated IPO last month is staggering. The company has wiped out over $1.1 trillion in market value since hitting an all-time high of $225 last month, and it’s possible that its decline is just getting started.

The rocket company has given investors little to grasp onto, apart from an ever-optimistic Musk claiming that it could one day be worth more than the entire Earth. On Thursday, the company was forced to scrub the launch of its Starship spacecraft because several engines failed to start — a perfect metaphor for the company’s recent stock market performance.

Meanwhile, countless short sellers are making billions by betting against the company, adding plenty of downward pressure on the stock.

Looming in the background is the second quarter earnings call of Musk’s EV maker, Tesla, on Wednesday evening. The company has been burning through cash at an alarming rate despite seeing sales and revenues jump. Analysts are still keeping close tabs on the chance that Musk may fold Tesla into SpaceX, a merger of unprecedented proportions. Tesla will likely be facing plenty of questions about the possibility during this week’s earnings call.

“I think there’s over 80 percent chance that Tesla and SpaceX get together in 2027,” tech analyst and longtime Tesla bull Dan Ives said in a note. “It’s the logical move from a data engineering perspective and Musk ownership. It makes too much sense for it not to happen.”

The level of uncertainty is palpable. SpaceX is lining up its prototype Starship rocket for another launch attempt on Thursday. Roughly a week and a half later, the company is expected to release its second quarter financials, a major litmus test of where the company is headed. As Yahoo Finance notes, investors are interested in how much the rocket company will be spending on AI products and the growth of its Starlink internet satellite business.

What likely won’t change is the fact that the company’s lofty valuation remains largely disconnected from its ability to make any money. SpaceX lost almost $5 billion last year — and xAI, which was folded into the company when it took over X-formerly-Twitter, lost a further $6.4 billion.

More on SpaceX: SpaceX Is Learning a Nasty Lesson About Going Public When Your Main Product Is Experimental

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Is it possible to not like a movie in a normal way? Can it simply not be “your thing” without being transposed onto some intangible, ever-raging culture war?

It certainly isn’t if you’re an anti-woke crusader like SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. Like a lot of very online right wingers who are suddenly qualified classicists, he’s very upset about the new Odyssey adaptation directed by Christopher Nolan.

Nolan, according to Musk, “desecrated Homer and groveled on his knees just to meet the woke rules required to win an Oscar.” That’s because his movie dares to do stuff like cast Black women and a trans man in prominent roles, making the director what Musk termed an “anti-White racist.” In other words, it’s supposedly not “historically accurate” — never mind the fact that the epic poem contains gods wandering the Earth and a Cyclops.

Thankfully, there’s a wonderful piece of technology called AI out there that’s perfect for realizing the juvenile aesthetic predilections of stunted creatives who want to wallow in an imagined idea of what the past was like.

“Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer,” Musk declared Tuesday, referring to his own AI video generator.

Musk’s post quoted, and implicitly endorsed, a three minute dialogue scene that another user generated with Grok Imagine, featuring a virtual cast that looks more Western European than Mediterranean. No comment from Musk on if this was sufficiently “historically accurate,” of course, despite previously accusing Nolan of having “total contempt for the Greek people” with his casting.

Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer https://t.co/bVHzUmY9WN

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 22, 2026

Someone should probably let Musk know that there’s already a fully AI-generated Odyssey adaptation coming out, but the creators behind that one seem to respect Nolan, so it probably won’t be anti-woke enough for his taste.

But maybe the perfect Odyssey film doesn’t have to be AI-generated, if it’s in the hands of the right director.

One Musk fanboy suggested that he should “give Mel Gibson $100 million” to create a “painstakingly historically accurate” adaptation. Musk replied, “I’m down.” (The last movie Gibson directed, “Flight Risk,” was ripped to shreds by both critics and audiences.)

Though for the past few months Musk has fought like a combatant in the Trojan War to drum up controversy over Nolan’s film, his efforts have failed spectacularly. It opened to $264 million globally and will probably make a billion dollars, if not more, by the end of its run. It’s gotten rave reviews from critics, and moviegoers seem to love it, too. 

And is anyone surprised? Nolan is a beloved figure in Hollywood with legions of fans. Musk has his own army of devout followers, too, but the difference is that Musk is constantly miserable, alienating even some of his own followers with his extreme takes.

Nolan, whether you like his movies or not, is a showman that wants you to have a good time. Even Musk said Nolan was “awesome” a few years ago. Audiences will remember that they liked some of his other films and turn out for his new one. They probably won’t take notice Musk melting down about it online, even if each of his posts gets hundreds of thousands of likes on his platform he remolded to be his personal echo chamber.

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

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As shares of Elon Musk’s SpaceX continue to dip, short sellers betting against the company are making an absolute fortune.

As Reuters reported last week, short sellers had already made a whopping $8.7 billion in profit — and that was when the company’s stock was trading around $135. Since then, shares have cratered, dipping all the way down to an all-time low of $118 by Wednesday.

As a result, even more short sellers are throwing themselves at the chance to bet against the company, as CNBC reports. According to estimates from financial software company S3 Partners, around 206 million shares are being shorted, just under a third of all publicly tradable shares. That’s up from around 185 million just last week and only 40 million shares one month ago.

“We continue to see short sellers adding exposure ahead of several key upcoming catalysts, including the company’s first earnings report as a public company and subsequent lock-up expirations,” S3 head of research Matthew Unterman told CNBC.

Musk, who has an extensive track record of raging against Tesla short sellers, is clearly letting the issue get under his skin.

“The survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low,” he tweeted.

The almost-trillionaire also rehashed his belief that “SpaceX will be worth more than Earth if we achieve our goals,” stating without evidence that his extremely far-fetched prediction was “obviously true.”

But before it has any chance to take over the entire world, SpaceX has a lot to prove. The company confirmed this week that it will release its first quarterly earnings report on August 4, a major litmus test of where the company’s headed.

Chances are it won’t be pretty. SpaceX’s market capitalization of over $1.6 trillion — making it one of the most valuable companies in the world — has little to no bearing on its current business fundamentals. The company lost almost $5 billion last year. Musk’s xAI, which was folded into SpaceX earlier this year and renamed to SpaceXAI, similarly lost $6.4 billion.

To regain ground lost ground, Musk will have to convince investors of his lofty and untested goals of sending data centers into space and settling on the Moon with the help of SpaceX’s behemoth Starship spacecraft.

Those claims will be put to the test Thursday, when the company has scheduled another test of the mammoth rocket — and regardless of the outcome, we’re likely to see substantial stock movement in its wake.

More on SpaceX: Short Sellers Are Having a Field Day Betting Against SpaceX as Shares Continue to Slip

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Sometimes in business, the first to market isn’t ultimately the most successful.

That’s the reality for surveillance company Flock Safety, a now-infamous firm working to blanket the United States in automatic license plate readers known as ALPRs, which are basically AI-integrated cameras that interface to form wide-reaching webs of surveillance.

If you’ve heard of Flock, there’s a good chance it’s from one of the hundreds of decentralized local protests against the company’s devices currently raging across the country, or from a wave of negative press coverage.

According to data compiled by the anti-Flock site DeFlock.org, at least 53 municipalities have shredded their contracts with Flock over concerns that federal officials were accessing data collected by the company. Unfortunately for privacy activists and citizens concerned about police surveillance, that doesn’t necessarily mean ALPRs are going away — just that they’re increasingly being supplied by Flock’s competitor.

With Flock suffering some major brand damage as the face of ALPRs, the company Axon has emerged as a strong runner up. The publication Gadget Review observes that in cities like Denver, officials are ending controversial contracts with Flock in order to make room for Axon, which provides a remarkably similar surveillance architecture — just without the specter of federal overreach.

While Axon might lack the toxic name recognition that currently hampers Flock, the police tech company has plenty of controversy of its own.

Back in 2024, Axon was panned for the release of “Draft One,” a ChatGPT-integrated piece of software that transcribed law enforcement body cam audio into police reports. As critics noted at the time, the technology was widely prone to hallucinations, and large language models remain particularly susceptible to racial bias.

Prior to that, Axon faced significant backlash for its announcement that it would deploy drones armed with tasers into schools, as part of a hare-brained scheme to combat the school shooting epidemic which continues to plague the US. (They were also implicated in lighting a guy on fire.)

Overall, privacy advocates now face an added challenge: not just of slowing Flock’s advance, but in making the case that there are no good ALPRs, regardless of what company’s logo is slapped on the surveillance pole.

More on Flock: In Light of Overwhelming Backlash, Flock Cancels Creepy Audio Surveillance Feature

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