In light of plummeting public support for its widespread automatic license plate readers, surveillance company Flock has lost dozens of contracts with cities across the US.

The company even drew up plans to use the dashcams installed in Uber and Lyft drivers’ cars to spy on other vehicles, as 404 Media reported this week.

Citizens are increasingly disgusted by the company’s presence on public streets, opting to hack down the cameras, blind them, or sabotage them in other creative ways.

“His project, which he calls noRecognition, allows people to escape the automatic detection and algorithmic surveillance used across the U.S. and beyond.” https://t.co/OIQNOt9B0a @TechCrunch

— Christina Ayiotis, Esq., CRM, CIPP/E, AIGP (@christinayiotis) August 10, 2026

And according to cybersecurity researcher Bill Swearingen, there may be other creative ways to befuddle Flock’s spy cams. He devised with a special computer-generated pattern which, once stretched out across the vehicle in the form of a wrap, will result it in not being flagged as a car by Flock’s cameras.

During this year’s Def Con cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas, Swearingen showed off a 2009 Toyota Yaris wrapped in vinyl featuring the logo of automotive publication Donut Media (which is owned by Futurism‘s parent company Recurrent Ventures.)

Despite the car looking a bit chaotic — albeit still very much like a small passenger vehicle to the human eye — “we proved it was effective,” Swearingen told TechCrunch. The Yaris successfully defeated surveillance detection at Def Con during the pattern’s first public test.

“Privacy is a fundamental right,” he added, aiming to give people a way to “opt out of being tracked.”

To come up with the pattern, he used a reinforcement learning model that trained itself on patterns that evade detection. The model got to the point of being able to confuse all 11 open source detection algorithms he tested, per TechCrunch, in addition to Flock’s license plate readers and even Axon’s body-worn cameras used by police departments.

As part of his noRecognition crowdsourcing campaign, Swearingen has also come up with T-shirts and hoodies that feature algorithmic detection-busting patterns. He hopes to eventually put pattern-printed skins for entire cars on sale as well.

The effort is part of a much broader trend of companies offering up garments that incorporate “adversarial patterns,” which can exploit weaknesses in computer vision systems.

One thing is clear: as outrage over Flock’s heavy presence across the country grows, people are looking for any way to foil the tech — especially if it looks cool.

More on Flock: Flock’s Secret Surveillance Plan Will Make You Gasp

The post Man Covers Car in Special Wrap That Breaks Flock Cameras’ Electronic Brains appeared first on Futurism.

It’s not just you — the United States is going through a record-bustingly hot summer.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the contiguous US averaged 76.89 degrees Fahrenheit in July, which is even hotter than the July 1936 Dust Bowl, an environmental and agricultural disaster marked by devastating dust storms.

Much like the Dust Bowl, which was the result of both natural and human-made factors, this year’s record-breaking temperatures are the result of a strong El Niño — a naturally occuring weather pattern — exacerbating the calamitous effects of human-caused climate change.

“It’s not good when you’re breaking records from the Dust Bowl, which we are in this case,” Yale Climate Connections meteorologist Jeff Masters told the Associated Press. “And that was a crazy sort of situation where you put tens of millions of people in motion. You had this great migration because of the drought and the heat that hit the center of the US — just a cataclysmic event in US history.”

“If we’re exceeding records from the Dust Bowl, that says that we’re in deep trouble,” Masters added.

While the heat was more concentrated in the Midwest during the Dust Bowl, all 48 lower states experienced excessive heat this summer — at least one degree Fahrenheit warmer than the 20th century average.

And instead of focusing on ways to fight the effects of climate change, much of the country is moving in the opposite direction. The Trump administration is closely aligned with the fossil fuel industry and is actively seeking to reopen coal-burning plants. AI data centers powered by gas generators are compounding a major uptick in greenhouse gas emissions.

The result is a country literally on fire, while suffering the second-worst July drought conditions on record for the contiguous US, according to Yale Climate Connections. Per the US Drought Monitor, a whopping 71 percent of the contiguous US experienced abnormal dryness or drought during the first week of August, coming on top of billions of dollars in direct damages during the first half of 2026.

Meanwhile, major wildfires continue to burn across both the US and Canada, exposing millions to dangerous levels of air pollution and causing an estimated 4,000 premature deaths across the continent within a single week last month, according to The Economist.

The prognosis is just as grim as one might think.

“This may be one of the coolest years we’re gonna experience for the rest of our lives,” Masters told the AP.

To give humanity a fighting chance we need to “stop burning so many fossil fuels,” he added. “We also need to be spending money to adapt to the new climate that we’ve put in place.”

More on climate change: AI Data Centers Are Causing Unfathomable Amounts of Air Pollution, and It Gets Worse With Each New One They Build

The post It’s Official: This Is the Hottest America Has Ever Been appeared first on Futurism.

German AI researcher and hedge fund manager Leopold Aschenbrenner became the poster child for the hubris of an AI-obsessed Wall Street last month.

Some $35 billion of investors’ money, in the form of leveraged bets on AI infrastructure stocks, evaporated in front of the 24-year-old’s eyes as tech shares were hit by yet another major sell off.

The humbling couldn’t have come at a worse time. The funds vanished days before his wedding with Anthropic chief of staff Avital Balwit. According to the New Yorker, the two had to cancel their honeymoon as a result.

Aschenbrenner isn’t alone. According to new data from Hedge Fund Research, tech funds dropped by seven percent in July, the worst period for the investments since the depths of the 2008 global financial crisis, the Telegraph reports.

A separate hedge fund, called value Aligned Research Advisors, which shares a similar portfolio to Aschenbrenner’s, similarly slid 44 percent in July as tech stocks reeled from major volatility.

The bruising month has further compounded fears over a massive surge in AI spending with no clear path to profitability in sight. Investors have become wary of big tech companies’ ever-higher capital expenditure forecasts as concerns over an AI bubble continue to mount.

Staying on track and maintaining high profit margins has become a high risk high reward game.

“When valuations are elevated, and positioning is concentrated, the difference between being on the right and wrong side of a trade can become unusually large — and very quickly,” Erlen Capital Management managing partner Bruno Schneller told the Telegraph. “Specialist technology strategies can generate exceptional returns when momentum and narrative are aligned, but they can also experience abrupt, leverage-amplified reversals when those conditions change.”

The game is far from over. Even Aschenbrenner’s fund has since recovered and his making new investments after being forced to unwind trades and sell major chunks of its holdings last month.

Yet how much longer the highly AI-leveraged stock market can sustain itself is anybody’s guess. In a blog post on Friday, Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok pointed out that those who reap the biggest profits, including companies making AI models, are massively depending on profits being “funded by investors rather than earned from customers.”

Put simply, AI companies aren’t making any significant amount of money from providing a worthwhile product, but from “capital raised by the layer losing money,” per Slok.

“Capital can bridge the gap for a while, but not indefinitely,” Slok argued. “And therein lies the risk: will the ROI show up for AI’s end customers fast enough to sustain the spending that is generating those upstream margins?”

More on AI: VC-Funded Startups Linked to Persistent Fraud

The post AI Investors Are Suddenly Quaking in Their Boots appeared first on Futurism.

Last month, the Federal Communications Commission approved an experimental and controversial new satellite being developed by venture Reflect Orbital to reflect sunlight down onto the Earth to illuminate patches of it at night for paying customers.

The purported goal is to allow solar farms to continue generating electricity even after nightfall and provide illumination during emergencies. Those may sound like noble ideas on the surface, but the concept comes with major downsides as well.

One is that such bright satellites could easily wreck deep space observations. Astronomers were appalled at the news, with the FCC receiving nearly nearly 2,000 public comments criticizing the proposal, as Wired reported at the time.

And it’s not just professional astronomers that could be affected, as experts told The Verge. Amateur astronomers gazing up at the prototype mirror satellite, dubbed Eärendil-1 — continuing Silicon Valley’s obsession with borrowing names from JRR Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” — could easily be blinded. Even looking through a 12-inch telescope, a common type used by enthusiasts, could result in permanent eye damage.

It’s a considerable risk to human health that makes the FCC’s approval “extraordinary,” as Royal Astronomical Society deputy executive director Robert Massey told The Verge.

It’s a risk experts have known for decades now. Case in point, observing a similar proposed Russian prototype, dubbed Znamya, could cause damage equivalent to staring at the Sun around a total eclipse, according to a 2000 research article by the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. (Russia launched two experimental Znamya space mirror satellites in the 1990s, but later abandoned the program.)

Critics of the FCC’s approval of Reflect Orbital’s plans pointed out the risk of eye damage to the regulator, which wound up being deemed irrelevant and too “small” of a factor compared to the “benefits of permitting American companies to test innovative technology in space.”

As The Verge points out, astronomers won’t even be warned of when and where the mirror satellite will be in the night sky, which could result in them gazing at it inadvertently.

Reflect Orbital spokesperson Christopher Buscombe told the publication that the company is in active talks with “scientists, astronomers, environmental researchers and other stakeholders” and that it will use its initial demonstration satellite to test out built-in safeguards.

The Air Line Pilots Association has also raised concerns over Reflect Orbital’s inadequate approach to air safety. The satellites could also disrupt sleep and the circadian rhythms migratory species.

“The proposed scale of orbital deployment would represent a significant alteration of the natural night-time light environment at a planetary scale,” the presidents of several international chronobiology assocaitions said in a joint statement quoted by The Guardian.

Buscombe told The Verge that the company would limit the amount of light being reflected and calibrate brightness to “levels humans and animals already tolerate.” But experts warn there are far too many variables that the company won’t be able to control for, from light scattering in the atmosphere to interactions with clouds.

Satellites in general are an increasingly controversial topic. The number of spacecraft in low Earth has exploded over the past decade, and many are being delivered at lower altitudes that make them appear even brighter.

“The stars above us are a valued part of human heritage – deploying more than one million exceptionally bright satellites would utterly destroy this and permanently scar the natural landscape,” Massey told The Verge.

More on the satellites: Astronomers Horrified by Enormous Mirror Satellite That Reflects Sunlight Back Down to Earth at Night

The post Scientists Warn That New Satellites Could Cause Eye Damage for People on the Ground appeared first on Futurism.

Last week, Nieman Lab revealed that USA Today‘s parent company USA Today Co (formerly Gannett) was partnering with AI surveillance firm Palantir to monetize “actionable intelligence” on its audience.

According to USA Today CEO Mike Reed, the goal is to “build a common intelligence layer” on reader data to “monetize those relationships faster and at much greater value.”

The largest newspaper’s new partnership with the Peter Thiel-cofounded company, which has long been mired in controversy — from collaborating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and being linked to US airstrikes that killed over 120 schoolchildren in Iran to its mercurial CEO, who has a long history of strange outbursts — has raised plenty of eyebrows.

Workers represented by The News Guild, the country’s largest communications and media labor union, including journalists at USA Today, were “shocked” by the news, according to a new statement, and are calling for the company to “immediately end its partnership with Palantir.”

“While [Reed] championed this partnership as a way to drive revenue, we believe it threatens to undermine trust in our news outlets and raises serious questions about the data security of our readers,” the statement reads.

“We have significant ethical issues with Palantir, whose artificial intelligence software has been used to advance widespread surveillance and power immigration crackdowns,” the union wrote. “Not only does partnering with Palantir, a major player in the news we cover, create an inherent conflict of interest, but it fails the journalists who have been assaulted and falsely arrested while covering immigration enforcement actions and protests.”

The News Guild accused USA Today Co of not disclosing details regarding the new partnership and raised concerns over how readers’ personal information and data will be treated and protected.

“Without answers, how can journalists encourage readers to subscribe to our news outlets?” the union wrote.

As a result, the union is calling for USA Today Co to “steer clear” in order to maintain journalistic integrity and maintain “with the kind of responsibility and skepticism that the nation’s largest network of journalists should exhibit.”

The union also called attention to the dire state of the news industry, with a major pivot to AI being cited to justify major layoffs at countless newspapers and publications.

Even within Palantir’s own ranks, employees are starting to speak up, with some starting to wonder whether “they’re the bad guys,” as Wired reported earlier this year.

The company’s reputation has taken such a major hit that even its major contract with the UK government’s National Health Service is on shaky ground. Earlier this year, London mayor Sadiq Khan also blocked a Palantir contract with the city’s Metropolitan police force, arguing the department “did not adequately demonstrate value for money for Londoners.”

More on Palantir: USA Today Partners With Palantir to Gain “Actionable Intelligence” On Its Audiences

The post USA Today Journalists Horrified by Newspaper’s Partnership With Palantir appeared first on Futurism.

A quiet war is playing out in rural communities across the country.

City council meetings are bursting into conflict as local residents try to keep AI data centers out of their backyards. Americans are starting to see through the promises of tech companies and the local politicians they’ve wooed, realizing that the advantages of hosting a resource-hogging data center in the neighborhood are slim.

Yet tech giants are finding creative — and sometimes startlingly dirty — new ways to circumvent local opposition in their quest to build out these sprawling facilities. As the Wall Street Journal reports, Amazon exploited 45-year-old zoning laws in Gilroy, California, to start construction on a data center without any residents knowing for five entire years.

“Many if not most residents first learned about this project after construction had already begun,” local elementary-school teacher Coleen Crew told the town’s recent council meeting, as quoted by the WSJ.

A single city staffer, the community’s development director, greenlit Amazon’s 438,500-square-foot data center, which spans 56 acres of former farmland. The ancient zoning criteria allowed industrial development along the location on a local freeway.

Gilroy’s mayor was surprised his constituents suddenly wanted a say.

“It didn’t bother them that a food-distribution center came to Gilroy without their engagement, but now it bothers them that a data center is coming to Gilroy without them having the possibility of engagement,” he told the WSJ.

There are plenty of reasons why residents would be against Amazon’s latest project. Data centers are a massive resource hog and have been known to raise electricity prices, spike local greenhouse gas emissions, generate ear-splitting noise, and taint water supplies. They are not typically major job creators.

In short, likening it to a “food-distribution center” isn’t exactly a fair comparison.

Amazon Web Services president of economic development Roger Wehner told the WSJ that the company “followed standard approval processes for an industrially zoned parcel,” but acknowledged that it should’ve recognized the community’s desire for “more engagement sooner.”

“We’ve since met directly with residents and hosted an open house to hear feedback and answer questions,” he added.

City officials are now wondering whether to change the approval process in ways that would force developers to hold community meetings and engage with residents.

When resident Rosa Rodriguez found out about the project, she asked city staff in February to publicly comment on an environmental review report, citing concerns over the drought the region is facing. But planners shut her down, telling her the comment period had closed back in September 2024, long before she knew about the project’s existence.

Amazon has since tried to win over the public, touting a new wastewater pipeline, tax revenue, construction jobs, and even the sponsorship of the annual Gilroy Garlic Festival. However, frustrated residents weren’t mollified, demanding to at least be made aware of big unfolding projects like the data center.

More on data centers: AI Data Centers Are Causing Unfathomable Amounts of Air Pollution, and It Gets Worse With Each New One They Build

The post Amazon Used a Startlingly Dirty Trick to Build a Data Center Without Consent of Community appeared first on Futurism.

Even as they promise AI will supercharge productivity, tech leaders are sending a clear message: any efficiency gains won’t help individual workers.

During a podcast appearance last month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that he doesn’t “expect AI” to lead to a shorter four-hour work week. He argued that workers are “secretly” going to be “happy” about being “much busier” and working even harder thanks to AI — a bizarre and out-of-touch comment from a billionaire with extraordinary power over the lives of working people.

Now, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth has similarly cracked the whip, as Business Insider reports — and he’s even willing to berate the company’s workers for asking for more time off.

During a July Q&A with staff, Bosworth shut down an employee who asked if AI productivity gains could be used to revive “Meta Days,” a cancelled holiday program that once allowed staff to take more days off a year.

Bosworth was apparently appalled at the idea, saying that “I hope that what we do with our extra time is do even more and cooler stuff for the users who use our products every day.”

The thinly-veiled implication at a tech giant that’s been rocked by repeated rounds of brutal layoffs: you should be so happy to still be employed!

“We got billions of people using our products every day,” he added. “I get an extra hour. You know what I do with it? I put it into that.”

The executive then dug his heels even further, personally insulting the staffer for asking about work-life balance.

“Go to your parents and ask them: hey, like every time I get a chance to talk to my boss, ask me if I can have more days off,” he said, per BI. “Ask your parents what they think of that as a career strategy.”

It’s a harrowing reaction, highlighting not just how AI is leading to widespread burnout, but just how grim the working environment at Meta has become as of late. The Mark Zuckerberg-led company fired around 8,000 employees earlier this year as its attempts to catch up to the competition in the AI space continue to sputter.

In June, Zuckerberg acknowledged plummeting morale among workers, while offering underwhelming ideas to lift their spirits.

Taking time off has become a massive point of contention, with a lawsuit filed last month accusing Meta of using AI tools to tag workers who had taken time off for maternity leave or disability accommodation, in order to lay them off later.

After his tirade, Bosworth appeared to have had a moment of clarity. He apologized for coming down “too hard” on the employee, per BI, while trying to brush off his abrasive commentary as “tongue-in-cheek.”

But the damage was already done. Bosworth’s crashout once again highlights how precarious the situation for knowledge workers has become. Any productivity gains from AI are unlikely to lead to any meaningful improvements in the quality of life for them, even as they’re already struggling to stay employed.

Besides, as managers are finding out the hard way, those productivity gains appear to be far more elusive than company leaders led us to believe.

More on Meta: Sam Altman Says Even the Power of AI Will Never Lead to a Shorter Work Week

The post Meta Exec Rages Against Employees Asking for More Time Off Because AI Made Them More Efficient appeared first on Futurism.

It’s no secret that data centers have become a massive sore point for a vast swathe of the American electorate.

Poll after poll has found that the facilities are immensely unpopular, a key bipartisan issue that could prove significant during this year’s midterm elections. The situation has become so heated there have already been at least 37 arrests stemming from protests against the projects this year.

Broadly speaking, critics take issue with the sheer amount of space data centers take up, how much air and noise pollution they generate, concerns that they’re driving up electricity prices — all while barely making a difference job creation. Moratoriums on new data center projects like the New York governor Kathy Hochul imposed last month are currently a bipartisan slam dunk.

Yet in his great political wisdom, president Donald Trump is siding firmly with villains of the day.

“I saw Texas the other day sort of is against data centers,” he told Punchbowl News in a new interview. “I think it’s a mistake.”

Trump was likely referring to the gold rush-like scramble to construct new data centers in the Lone Star State suffering a brutal collision with reality. Last week, governor Greg Abbott announced a pause on new approvals on the projects to save Texas’ already shaky power grid from collapsing in on itself.

The president gushed over data centers being some of the “most incredible buildings I’ve ever seen” — while wind mills with far smaller footprints are “ugly losers” — and argued that they’re “tremendously important for the economics” and “income.” Trump went as far as to argue that data centers “could be bigger than oil,” raging that we “can’t let China beat us at this.”

The outburst builds on a sense that Trump is increasingly a political outsider in the US. His approval ratings have hit historic lows, showing widespread disillusionment with the Iran war, fluctuating gas prices, and a growing affordability crisis.

Trump has maintained what’s been criticized as a “too cozy relationship” with the tech industry. In return, AI tech leaders, many of whom have made sizeable donations to Trump’s political efforts, have enjoyed a largely regulation-free policy environment.

The reality is that the benefits of data centers are dicey. Critics argue that the resource-hogging facilities only line the pockets of a few multibillionaires and most of the times aren’t accompanied by an economic boom or spike in employment in places where they’re being built.

Instead, researchers warn they’re leading to a significant rise in greenhouse gas emissions, particularly in Texas, where many are using gas-burning backup generators to stay online.

Meanwhile, those who refuse contracts for their land be used to construct new data centers are being hailed as folk heroes.

Naturally, Trump took full credit for the AI boom in the US.

“And if we turn off on data centers, we turn off on AI,” he told Punchbowl. “We are leading because of me. We’re leading AI. Remember this. I came up with an idea that was a great idea. Nobody thought it was serious.”

More on data centers: The Number of Regular People Being Arrested for Protesting Data Centers Is Astounding

The post Reading the Room Perfectly, Donald Trump Becomes Greatest Defender of Data Centers appeared first on Futurism.

If you feel like the internet is turning into a place for bots — not to mention by bots — you’re not alone.

Social media platforms have been flooded with low-effort AI slop, while even once renowned publications are doubling down on the tech by outsourcing writing and editing responsibilities to the tech. In June, Cloudflare found that website traffic from AI agents and bots had overtaken human-generated traffic for the first time — even earlier than predicted.

In the latest sign of the bot takeover, Time magazine has begun serving ads specifically aimed at AI agents. As Digiday reports, it’s an effort to adapt to a new reality governed by the tech. Their promise to would-be clients: by optimizing ads for the bots, brands could be made more visible to AI chatbots and show up in more responses.

The publication started stripping down its webpages last month from HTML to markdown — text-only versions, which live in parallel to the user-facing pages — that are easier for AI agents to ingest. Alongside these new pages, the company is using AI to generate agent ads, which are formatted as FAQs that include a brand’s information and messaging, according to Digiday, and are labeled as “sponsored content.”

It’s a bizarre new tack for the online media industry, which has been reeling from a massive drop in traffic. That falloff has largely been attributed to Google stopping users from visiting websites by serving them with often inaccurate AI summaries.

To stay afloat in an industry mired by continuous layoffs, Time is trying to reinvent itself by appealing to advertisers that want sway in the AI era. A striking metric: the publication said it’s seeing more bots crawl its pages than humans on most days. It says several brands, including online banking service Ally Bank and not-for-profit Project Management Institute, have already signed up.

“Maybe it’s more important to influence the agent than even the human, because with a human you influence one person,” Mobian cofounder and CEO Jonah Goodhart told Digiday. “When you influence ChatGPT, you’re influencing potentially all of ChatGPT. If ChatGPT changes what it says about [a brand], it’s massive and it’s more than any one campaign could ever do.”

“The big idea here is LLMs and AI want trusted information about brands,” he added. “We’re serving that up to them in a very straightforward, easy way.”

To Time, it’s part of a broader effort to sell a Generative Engine Optimization — the AI era evolution of the Google-centered Search Engine Optimization industry — product to brands.

It’s an open question whether Time‘s gambit will pay off and make up for lost search traffic. As Digiday points out, it could even backfire if tech platforms like Google were to change the rules by penalizing AI-oriented ad spam or serving markdown pages aimed at bots that differ from what human users see.

In short, there’s no guarantee it will work, but Time is experimenting regardless.

Time chief operating officer Mark Howard told Digiday that “this is brand new, and we believe that we are paving the first path forward here.”

More on Google: Google Pulls Down Feature for AI-Generating Fake Satellite Images on Google Earth After It’s Immediately Used to Fake Terror Attacks

The post Time Magazine Now Running Ads Meant Specifically to Influence AI Agents appeared first on Futurism.

Reddit has long heavily relied on moderators, a team of volunteers working without pay to keep Reddit communities free of abuse and other nefarious content — with extremely varying degrees of success, earning them a certain reputation.

As AI automation continues to come for our jobs, soon even Reddit mods could be made redundant by the tech. As The Verge reports, Reddit is now deploying AI bots to help moderate new subreddits.

The suite of new automated moderation tools, dubbed “Rules Hub,” leverages the power of large language models to enforce rules set by human users, as detailed in a new blog post. The company says that by introducing AI mods, it could help keep AI spam at bay.

“We believe these changes will make Reddit more accessible, straightforward, and human while maintaining what makes the platform special,” the company wrote.

The word “human” certainly does a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. But whether AI bots fighting a barrage of other bots will ultimately improve the situation as the internet drowns in AI slop remains to be seen. Reddit, one of the last — and far from perfect — bastions of human-generated content on the web, has been under siege for years now, in a tragic mess that the company may not be able to AI itself out of.

Reddit hopes that its new tools will eventually be able to “replace many of the enforcement workflows that communities rely on from Automod,” or Automoderator, an existing moderation tool that has long been a thorn in the sides of users.

Its AI mod bots will have a key advantage over Automod, if Reddit is to be believed.

“Unlike Automod’s enforcement tools, which depend on exact keyword and pattern matching, Rules Hub uses LLMs to evaluate whether a post or comment matches the intent of a rule,” the company explained. “That allows Rules Hub to better handle nuance, natural language, and edge cases while preserving moderator control.”

But whether these new changes will be able to fix Reddit users’ already strained relationship with mods remains unclear at best.

Reactions to the news were mixed on the platform, to say the least, with some questioning whether the company is looking to fight fire with fire.

“As someone who moderates a small regional hip hop/rap subreddit that constantly has lyrics as comments, I do not expect this to work well with that kind of content,” one user wrote. “There’s a ton of stuff I already have to fish out of the filter because it’s “violent” or whatever and it’s just a song title or lyric. I doubt AI will be able to grasp the nuance of the lyrics of someone like Lee Scott or Jam Baxter.”

It’s a particularly contentious subject as Reddit continues to be overrun by AI slop and bot spam years after trying to force AI companies to pay to access Reddit data. At the time, new API restrictions triggered an outright rebellion by users.

“Before long, Reddit will be mostly AI bot accounts, moderated by AI bots, discussing mostly AI generated slop,” one disillusioned user wrote. “I genuinely don’t know if the fun parts of the internet are going to be usable 5-10 years from now if this continues.”

More on Reddit: Reddit Intentionally Breaks Its Mobile Website, Demanding Users Download Its App Instead

The post Reddit Finally Found a Way to Make Its Mods Even Worse: Replace Them With AI appeared first on Futurism.

In something like five billion years from now, our Sun is expected to run out of hydrogen fuel, expanding into a red giant that will eventually either engulf the Earth or send it spiraling outwards, an all but guaranteed end of all life on our pale blue dot.

But there may be a way for humanity to survive past the Sun’s demise even without having to leave our planet, as independent researcher Gabriel Harry outlines in a paper accepted for publication in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society.

It’s admittedly extremely far-fetched, but it’s a fun thought experiment that he argues could result in Earth staying habitable for another “9.1 million billion years.” Who could possibly argue against that?

In an accompanying piece for Phys.org, Harry lays out his daring plan. First, he proposes blocking out the Sun to keep the Earth from burning to a crisp by placing a “large sunshade at the Lagrange point 1, which is a “gravitational balancing spot between the Sun and Earth.”

“We’d need to cover a huge 70-degree area of the sky to ensure the red giant would be eclipsed,” he wrote. It would indeed be immense: it’d need to be roughly 434,000 miles in radius, tied to a carbon tether 1.2 million miles in length.

To provide the warming radiation that was now being blocked, Harry suggests sending fusion reactors some 4,000 miles deep into Jupiter’s atmosphere to produce energy, which would then have to be transmitted via laser back to the Earth.

And to move the Earth away from the self-destructing Sun, Harry thinks we could “redirect an asteroid to fly close to Earth’s surface a million times, with the gravitational slingshot effect gradually transferring energy to increase Earth’s orbital distance.”

Moving it that far away would stop the Earth’s tectonics and nutrient cycles, something Henry images could be solved by “sinking [4 pounds] of antimatter” into the Earth’s core per day.

Fast forwarding some four to five billion years, and any surviving humans would need to move the entire solar system out of the way of an incoming Andromeda galaxy, which is currently on a collision course with the Milky Way, Harry argues. To do so, he suggested firing a “beam of hydrogen just above or below the Sun’s north or south pole” to generate a “gravitational slingshot effect.”

In all, Harry’s galaxy-brain proposal would allow humans to stay alive without having to cover interstellar distances — something that would require a “million times” more energy — or terraforming a new planet. Because, after all, what’s better than staying right here, a comfortable place organic life has called home for around four billion years already?

“By building and maintaining the safeguards, for 9.1 million billion years, life on Earth would enjoy comfortable geology, security, seasons, days and starry nights — until, in a hundred trillion years, the last star fades out and the night sky turns dark,” Harry on Phys.org.

More on the Sun’s death: Earth Will One Day Die, But We Could Survive By Moving Here

The post Scientist Reveals Plan to Save Earth From Destruction by the Sun appeared first on Futurism.

Last month, OpenAI made a headline-generating claim: that a group of its AI models had conspired to break free, access the internet, and hack into the internal systems of open source AI platform Hugging Face, which confirmed the infiltration.

The incident rattled the tech industry, seemingly illustrating how the threat of AI models turning into rogue cybersecurity threats had become a reality. Months earlier, Anthropic’s Mythos AI model had already also drawn attention after it was similarly found to have broken containment. Then, this week, Meta also said its own frontier model had been implicated in yet another inadvertent hack of a third party company, closely followed by security researchers saying Chinese open-weight model Kimi K3 had done the same.

But while it’s not hard to see an emerging trend, some thorny questions about how severe the situation really is are starting to crop up, with some experts arguing these incidents could’ve easily been avoided.

For one, the slow and surprisingly deliberate way OpenAI’s models moved during the Hugging Face hack — right beneath OpenAI’s nose — gives a whiff that the company may have been careless in monitoring the experimental AI.

During a presentation at the Black Hat conference this week, OpenAI security engineer Michael Dalton and safety researcher Eric Wallace expanded on what went down during the hack. Wallace explained that a “team of agents” that were “working together,” had been “finding exploits, sharing them with one another, moving laterally through our systems and external systems, and doing this over the course of days and weeks,” as quoted by Wired.

The agents even left a lengthy track record of their schemings on an internal message board, which ultimately contained hundreds of thousands of messages. It also raises a question: with OpenAI’s immense resources, why wasn’t anybody monitoring these frontier models as they rampaged through the net?

The AI models shared exploits with each other on this messaging board, an “explosion in communication and intelligence from models,” per Wallace. They acted in sometimes strikingly human — and therefore messy — ways, splitting up tasks and even accidentally deleting each other’s work, leading to what Wired characterized as “petty drama.”

In other words, these AI agents were leaving an enormous trail of bread crumbs that alert OpenAI’s many human researchers could have spotted. And the same, obviously, goes for their colleagues at Anthropic, Meta and Moonshot AI, the creator of Kimi.

Researchers have described the incident as “reckless” and easily avoided, as Wired reported late last month.

“A simple analysis of the actual risk has an actual simple answer,” security and compliance consultant Davi Ottenheimer told the publication at the time. “The OpenAI mistakes were dead simple.”

“I’d call it more of a defensive failure than exceptionally good offense,” AI hacking agents company Pensar R&D head Kyle Ryan told TechCrunch..

Whether the hack was as much of a “pivotal moment both for our company as well as the AI industry as a whole,” as Dalton put it during this week’s conference, remains debatable. For one, these AI companies are highly motivated to characterize their models as a major threat to cybersecurity to stand out against neck-in-neck competition.

According to Dalton, OpenAI is vowing to beef up “security prevention, detection, and response techniques” while “consciously slowing down research in order to enhance security and to upgrade the security principles.”

When every leading AI lab has had the same thing happen, it’s worth asking whether they should have taken those steps proactively.

More on the hacks: Jealously Watching OpenAI and Anthropic, Meta Suddenly Claims That Its AI Went on a Hacking Spree Too

The post Why Aren’t Any AI Companies Watching Their Frontier Models to Make Sure They Don’t Go on Hacking Sprees? appeared first on Futurism.

Hackers made away with more than $100 million worth of Bitcoin from thousands of supposedly secured “cold” wallets hosted by Canada-based company Coinkite.

As Bloomberg reports, the hackers managed to infiltrate the wallets despite clients having a physical hardware key associated with their accounts, which was supposed to provide nearly impenetrable security.

“The moment it loaded I knew I was screwed because I saw red lines for withdrawals,” one of the victims, Johnathan Goodman, told Bloomberg. “Between 9:36 and 9:43 pm on July 29th, all three of my wallets were completely drained.”

Crypto insights company Galaxy Research estimated that around $110 million worth of Bitcoin had been drained from around 5,000 wallets last week, a figure that grew to at least 7,300 by Monday.

The incident highlights persistent lapses in security plaguing the largely unregulated cryptocurrency industry.

In the case of Coinkite, it was a particularly egregious lapse in security. The firm warned its customers on July 30 that hackers were exploiting a software bug that allowed them to reconstruct wallet “seed phrases,” which are sequences of random words that act as a master key to “cold” — or offline — wallets.

Coinkite promised in an email to Bloomberg in a followup story that it was racing to get a full picture of the embarrassing situation, saying it was working on “helping affected customers.” However, the company refused to estimate the scale of the losses, vowing to conduct a “post-mortem” at an unspecified future date.

“We’re not in a position to independently confirm total losses or validate the specific figures being reported by third parties,” the company told Bloomberg. “We won’t speculate on a number we can’t verify directly.”

The company also kicked off an “ongoing ecosystem-wide security audit” which has revealed “numerous critical bugs in key software systems across the ecosystem using frontier AI models.”

The cryptocurrency firm has since gone into full damage control mode as it investigates the major slipup.

In an “update on customer data retention” published on its website today, the company said that “due to legal obligations arising from the security incident, including the preservation of records that may be relevant to ongoing and anticipated legal proceedings, we have temporarily suspended our automated data-blanking process.”

“This means that customer records that would otherwise have been blanked under our standard schedule will be retained until further notice,” the company wrote.

More on crypto: Trump Boasts That He Can Profit Off Presidency as Much as He Wants: “I Found Out That Nobody Cared”

The post Hackers Figure Out a Trick to Steal Bitcoin From Cold Wallets, Grab $110 Million appeared first on Futurism.

Even notorious anti-vaxxer and US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr had to urge families to vaccinate their children against measles last week.

Despite being an entirely preventable disease thanks to a highly effective vaccine that has been widely available since the 1960s, cases of measles have skyrocketed in recent years, facilitated by a White House that’s declared war on scientific research, made a mess of childhood vaccine mandates, and furthered dangerous misinformation.

As of last week, the US had recorded 2,465 confirmed infections so far this year, already more than the 2,289 total cases in 2025. The last two years saw more total infections than the rest of the 21st century combined, as The Guardian reports, with 2026’s tally beating a 35-year record.

Now, in the midst of all that crisis crisis, a character has stumbled into the narrative who perfectly illustrates how it’s gotten so bad. As the LA Times reports, a measles-infected individual spent a whopping 11 hours at the Universal Studios Hollywood theme park last month, potentially exposing countless other visitors.

The Los Angeles County Public Health Department was forced to issue a stark warning: anybody who visited the amusement park on July 26 during teh hours between 10am and 9pm may have been exposed and should monitor for symptoms including fever, cough, or rash — and stay vigilant until August 16.

The virus is contagious up to four days before the characteristic rash appears on the skin, and up to four days after that.

Measles can easily spread through the air through just via talking or breathing, and can persist on surfaces for hours at a time.

The vaccine against it, available as part of the measles, mumps, and rubella combination (MMR) shot, is extremely worthwhile. Two doses are 97 percent effective in preventing a measles infection.

The department also urged “everyone to confirm their immunity and get the vaccine if needed, especially before traveling and attending crowded events.”

California has been hit particularly hard, recording at least three localized measles outbreaks this year so far. However, according to the state’s health department, all three outbreaks have ended.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there have been 38 new outbreaks in 2026 across the country so far this year, with several thousand cases spanning 47 states.

The danger to one’s health is substantial — especially to the unvaccinated. According to the CDC, roughly one in five unvaccinated people in the US who get measles are hospitalized. One out of 20 children with measles develop pneumonia. and one to three of every 1,000 children who become infected die from respiratory and neurologic complications.

More on infectious diseases: This Measles Outbreak at a Detention Center Perfectly Encapsulates America Right Now

The post Authorities Alarmed When Person With Measles Spends Entire Day Frolicking Around Universal Studios appeared first on Futurism.

Last month, OpenAI revealed that a group of its AI models had broken containment, hacking into the systems of open source AI platform Hugging Face.

On one hand, experts saw the incident as the latest warning sign that AI models had gotten to the point of being able to autonomously infiltrate targets, a threat we’ve been aware of for years rapidly turning into a reality.

On the other, a more skeptical read of the situation is that OpenAI could have orchestrated the hack as part of a “publicity stunt” — or at least lowered its guard just enough to allow it to happen, knowing the publicity would be invaluable. After all, just three months earlier, competitor Anthropic had made major headlines by announcing that its own Mythos AI model had similarly broken containment.

Put simply, it’s in the companies’ best interest to paint their AI models as capable enough to pose a real-world threat, especially as the industry grows ever more competitive.

Now the situation has gotten even stranger as a third company, Meta, has entered the fray. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the Mark Zuckerberg-led tech giant is claiming that during a recent test of one of its AI model conducted by an independent company, the AI accessed the internet and hacked a third-party service — an narrative that’s starting to get awfully familiar at this point.

According to The Information, the model involved was Meta’s Muse Spark 1.1, the company’s most advanced model yet, which was released by its Superintelligence Labs last month. Per the publication, the model breached an unidentified company’s systems and changed its internal environment.

Meta claims a “misconfiguration” during the hacking test had allowed its model to escape. A source told the WSJ that it was the same cybersecurity benchmark test that led to previous hacking incidents at Anthropic and OpenAI. Earlier this week, the company that conducted benchmark tests for all three AI companies, called Irregular, said it had caught OpenAI and Anthropic AI agents gaining unauthorized access to secure systems.

As we await more details regarding the latest incident — Meta has promised to investigate and publish a report — the suspicious optics of the situation are hard to escape. Meta has long struggled to keep up with the competition as the AI race continues to heat up. Could the company be looking for favorable media coverage about how its AI model is similarly capable of breaking containment?

Irregular said it hadn’t noticed any “current open issues” related to its test environment, per the WSJ. But while there wasn’t any real-world harm — at least that we know of — stemming from these hacks, researchers warn that the threat of AI models going rogue is coming to a head.

Just earlier this week, the UK government-backed AI Security Institute revealed that OpenAI and Anthropic models took “unsanctioned action on the live internet” and went as far as to create fake identities on GitHub to pressure a human user into approving a malware-tainted software update.

“What they’re doing is coming up with very sophisticated strategies or cyberattacks to be able to achieve the goal that they’ve been given,” global chief AI officer of advertising firm WPP Daniel Hulme told the BBC. “When you give an AI a goal, if you don’t think of all the ways it might be able to achieve the goal, it will find a way to achieve a goal that you haven’t thought about.”

More on the hacks: OpenAI’s Escaped Models Were Allegedly Rampaging More Extensively Than Previously Reported

The post Jealously Watching OpenAI and Anthropic, Meta Suddenly Claims That Its AI Went on a Hacking Spree Too appeared first on Futurism.

We certainly wouldn’t blame you for having completely forgotten that last year, Elon Musk tried to reinvent Wikipedia because he thought it was too woke.

In October, his AI startup xAI launched Grokipedia, named after its AI chatbot. The encyclopedia stole human-written and edited pages from Wikipedia wholesale and ran them through a large language model, which also fielded user-submitted edits, to better reflect Musk’s contorted worldviews.

The site was hardly an exemplary of objectivity. It was quickly found to heavily cite an infamous neo-Nazi forum as a source of information, desperately tried to paint Tesla’s Cybertruck as a successful and desirable electric pickup truck, and validated Musk’s favorite conspiracy theories. But it was a major cultural moment, garnering countless stories in the media and discussions on podcasts over Musk’s attempt to control the spread of information.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the desperate attempt to twist the largest online encyclopedia in human history into an extension of an almost-trillionaire’s bigoted mind appears to have ground to a screeching halt — and, damningly, barely anybody seems to have noticed.

According to a new investigation by Lawfare, Grokipedia appears to have entirely stopped updating itself sometime earlier this year. Reviewing suggested edits from humans has also ground to a halt.

“As far as we can tell, no entry has changed in more than three months,” Lawfare concluded of the site, which is now owned by SpaceX since it merged with Musk’s AI efforts.

Worse yet, the site’s edit log appears to have broken completely as well, making it impossible to track which user-suggested changes were “accepted” or “rejected” by the AI.

By January, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism had already observed that xAI’s Grok was making more edits to its own articles than acting on human-suggested ones, suggesting a bottoming out of interest for the project.

Since then, it has turned into a ghost town, a completely redundant and misinformation-filled copy of Wikipedia, which remains one of the last bastions of human-edited and verified sources of information on the internet.

Even when Lawfare submitted an “uncomplicated factual update” about SpaceX having launched its IPO in June — an irrefutable fact that any allegedly “open source, comprehensive collection of all knowledge” should probably include — the Grokipedia entry remained stagnant.

Even pages that are purportedly drawing millions of views aren’t updating. The most recent approved update Lawfare could locate — to the entry about OpenAI’s ChatGPT — dates back to April 24.

As of today, Lawfare found that that there are 13,002 suggestions that “sit unresolved, trapped ‘in review.'”

“Altogether, what we found was that the ‘live’ change feed is gone, past decisions were retroactively reverted without explanation, new decisions are not being issued, and article text appears frozen (and, in some cases, outdated),” the publication concluded. “We do not know whether xAI is preparing a major revision or has altogether abandoned active development of the project.”

It’s a precarious situation. Despite having been abandoned, Similarweb data suggests Grokipedia received over six million visits in June alone. Hundreds of thousands of sites are also still citing Musk’s encyclopedia, which could spread misinformation even further.

Futurism has reached out to SpaceX for an update on the project, but considering the reputation of Musk’s companies and their refusal to interact with the media, we’re not holding our breath for a response.

More on Grokipedia: Elon Musk Is Not Beating the Allegations: Grokipedia Cites a Hardcore Nazi Website 42 Times

The post Grokipedia Appears to Have Completely Broken and Nobody Noticed appeared first on Futurism.

Text-to-video AI generating tools have come a long way. Just three years ago, we were all unsettled by grisly clips of actor Will Smith’s face morphing while “eating” a moving pile of spaghetti.

Thanks to major leaps in the tech, these tools can now generate photorealistic fake footage at the drop of a hat — which could have devastating implications for efforts to keep disinformation at bay.

However, those who are heavily invested in AI are welcoming the rapid unraveling of truth as AI slop continues to flood the internet. Case in point: Andreessen Horowitz partner Justine Moore, who recently boasted that the venture capital firm-backed Black Forest Labs’ Flux 3 AI tool — which launched in late July — was “exceptional at generating historical footage.”

Moore shared a 20-second clip of “elementary school students in the ’90s predicting how we’ll use computers.” On the surface, it seems like a feel-good narrative of young kids accurately forecasting major advances in tech.

“They’ll probably do our homework,” one of the AI-generated children said in the clip.

“Maybe they’ll make movies for us,” another fictional child added, perfectly echoing Holloywood executives’ desires to turn the entertainment industry into a slop factory.

Turns out that Flux 3 is exceptional at generating historical footage…

like elementary school students in the '90s predicting how we'll use computers.

(the last girl is my favorite!) pic.twitter.com/oH6qJy8AQU

— Justine Moore (@venturetwins) July 28, 2026

While the clip isn’t exactly a major departure from actual predictions dating back to the 1980s, as Gizmodo points out, Moore’s excitement about the AI slop highlights a dangerous disregard for the proliferation of believable yet fabricated historical records — like a more high tech version of the way the authorities in George Orwell’s novel “1984” constantly redacted newspapers and other records of the past in whatever way is convenient to the ruling party.

Once you scroll past the congratulatory comments other venture capital-tied accounts made in response to Moore’s video, plenty of netizens voiced their concerns.

“This is evil,” one account wrote. “AI is going to distort history and reality beyond comprehension.”

“Stuff of nightmares, this is a huge risk of misinformation and narrative control,” another added.

“Clappin your hands like a seal while a technology that will obviously used to gaslight the public is rolled out,” wrote another.

Experts have long warned that AI is filling the internet with easy-to-generate propaganda. Authoritarian regimes are already using the tech to spread disinformation and consolidate power. In 2024, OpenAI admitted that it had to intervene after discovering disinformation campaigns using its tech and originating from Russia, China, Israel and Iran.

While a young child predicting that robots will one day do their homework might seem pretty innocuous, the same kind of tools can be used for far more nefarious purposes.

Despite the glaring risks of facilitating the creation of dangerous propaganda, Moore is doubling down.

“This is an insanely fun and creative model that can do a really impressive range of things,” she said in a followup tweet.

Alongside the announcement of the release of Flux 3, she shared a 1990s-style clip of two CNN anchors informing the public of the news.

“Today researchers demonstrated an AI that can generate convincing video from text,” one of the anchors said in the video.

“Who’s gonna believe that?” his co-anchor replied.

More on AI video: Boomers on Facebook Are Leaving Comments That Make It Clear That They Have No Idea That AI-Generated Thirst Traps Aren’t Real

The post Andreessen Horowitz Partner Boasts That the Company’s New Tech Can Fabricate Fake History Like in “1984” appeared first on Futurism.

Investors were not impressed by SpaceX’s first-ever earnings report earlier this week. Shares dropped by more than ten percent, even after the company reported higher than expected revenue — comforting financial news which, unfortunately for CEO Elon Musk, was overshadowed by the venture’s massive AI spending.

The same day, SpaceX insiders, including employees and executives, got their first real opportunity to turn their holdings into cash after the total shares available for trading grew from around 639 million to 1.55 billion, a chunk of the stock valued at just over $100 billion being unlocked.

As Reuters put it, investors now faces an “irresistible opportunity to cash out.”

“This has to be the most talked-about lockup in the history of IPO lockups,” institutional ​brokerage firm R.F. Lafferty & Co CEO Robert Hackel told the agency. “You are going to see a lot of exits.”

It’s no wonder Musk’s rocket company is facing massive pressure this week. Shares are down more than 28 percent over the past month, currently hovering around $114, which is miles below its mid-June record high of $225.

SpaceX’s massive volatility briefly made Musk the world’s first trillionaire — only for him to lose that title once his rocket company’s stock came crashing back to Earth.

Its current share price is also low enough to keep an additional 455 million shares locked up, since it’s still south of its $135 IPO price, setting the stage for even more volatility if it were to claw itself back to that point.

Musk remaind steadfast in his ambitious vision for the company, from orbital data centers to a fleet of humanoid robots that would enable large scale manufacturing on the surface of the Moon.

During Tuesday’s earnings call, he admitted that his plans sound “totally nuts” and “super sci-fi right now,” but maintained that “it’s going to happen.”

Whether investors continue to buy into his vision, though, is anything but guaranteed. SpaceX’s success so far this year has largely been built on hype surrounding AI. The company was merged with Musk’s AI startup, xAI, bringing in plenty of new investors — but saddling it with billions of dollars in additional debt.

Its space ambitions hinge almost entirely on the success of Starship, a super-heavy launch platform that has yet to complete a single successful flight and landing.

SpaceX’s revenues, meanwhile, are heavily dependent on its Starlink satellite internet service. There’s certainly good news there, but the program also saw its average revenue per user drop over the last quarter, rattling investors.

In short, SpaceX’s path to profitability is inextricably linked to the belief that Musk’s sci-fi dreams can be turned into reality in a short enough time period that the dream won’t collapse in on itself.

“SpaceX wants to tell the story they’re the market leader,” The Westly Group founder Steve Westly told CNBC. “But people still have these questions: how quickly can they grow? How big are the costs going to be before this thing gets to profitability?”

More on SpaceX: SpaceX Achieves Its First Moon Landing by Accidentally Crashing Into It at 5,400 Miles Per Hour, Causing Huge Explosion and 60-Foot Crater

The post SpaceX Now Faces a Terrible Peril appeared first on Futurism.

Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket have long garnered a reputation for allowing users to make all kinds of ethically dubious bets, from the outcomes of deadly conflicts to mass famine. 

As the New York Times reports, Kalshi will now even allow users to bet on whether clinical trials for potentially lifesaving drugs will succeed.

To critics, the move will effectively allow betting on the lives of patients trying a final intervention in the face of a lethal diagnosis. There’s even risk that those enrolled in these trials could choose to drop out if the market were to bet against a positive outcome.

“Turning loose a betting market in an ongoing randomized clinical trial really is a breach of scientific conduct,” Robert Califf, who served as FDA commissioner in the Biden administration, told the NYT.

Kalshi first announced its “biotech prediction markets pilot program” last month, the same day president Donald Trump’s teleprompter guy was busted for winning more than $100,000 on Kalshi by betting on what he would say.

The company argued in the announcement that a “publicly listed contract on a trial or regulatory outcome produces a continuously updated, public probability that reflects the weight of the evidence rather than the preferred messaging of the trial sponsor.”

In a statement to the NYT, spokesperson Jack Such argued that these bets wouldn’t undermine research integrity, but instead cut through the hype surrounding biotech companies and the drugs they’re working on. 

Kalshi says it will prohibit betting by patients enrolled in a trial, as well as by employees of the company conducting it or its competitors, per the NYT. It will also ban betting on trials that “exclusively enroll minors,” at least at first.

But those enrolled in drug trials were left appalled by the news.

“We’re literally trying to stay alive,” metastatic pancreatic cancer patient Walter Ingaharro Jr told the NYT. “It’s not a game. The introduction of gambling into the process really creates an ethical mess.”

In an opinion piece for The Guardian, Boston University humanities professor Joshua Pederson talked about how his 12-year-old son has a “very aggressive tumor growing inches below his heart.”

“If Kalshi has its way, you could soon be able to bet on health treatments that could be essential to his survival,” Pederson argued.

While choosing a trial for his son’s cancer was a “terrifying experiment for which we feel ill-prepared,” turning to a prediction market instead of “our extremely qualified team of oncologists” feels “preposterous,” Pederson argued.

In short, it’s yet another example of prediction markets crossing a moral boundary by gamifying things with real-world consequences.

“The possibility that somebody out there might be wagering against my son, hoping that the treatment fails so they can make money, is enraging,” Pederson wrote. “How is this not just another type of ‘death market’ — like markets for war or assassination — that even Kalshi says it won’t abide?”

The headline of this story was updated to specify that the program would bet on the outcomes of clinical trials, and the piece was updated to more specifically refer to controversies around prediction markets like Kalshi, writ large, and to add details about Kalshi’s response.

More on prediction markets: In Case You Still Think Insider Trading on Prediction Markets Isn’t Real, Trump’s Teleprompter Guy Just Got Busted for Getting Rich on Betting What He Would Say

The post Kalshi Defends Plan to Bet on Outcomes of Clinical Trials appeared first on Futurism.

Texas is tripling down on the construction of AI data centers, at any cost.

But there’s a glaring problem that’s grinding construction plans to a halt: a woefully inadequate power grid that won’t be able to support all of these new facilities.

As The Texas Tribune reports, governor Greg Abbott announced a moratorium for all new data center approvals on Monday. It certainly wasn’t a response to the spiking bipartisan opposition to data centers that has gripped the nation. Instead, Abbott’s goal was to give regulators time to perform an audit on how to hook up new data centers to the Texas grid without melting it down.

“Our top priority is to protect Texans’ safety and quality of life,” Abbott said in a statement.

The scale of the proposed data center buildout is staggering. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) alone has a queue of over 1,800 projects that would draw over 474 gigawatts of electricity. According to the regulator, that’s over five times the Texas grid’s record for peak demand.

The news highlights major headwinds in the Lone Star State’s efforts to go all-in on AI, a construction frenzy that’s now experiencing a brutal collision with reality. Even before the AI gold rush, the state’s grid has struggled to keep households warm during unusually cold winters. Major cryptocurrency mining operations have also risked bringing the grid to its knees.

Other states have resisted the boom, with New York imposing the country’s first statewide ban last month.

As the Tribune points out, both the public and state officials are being kept in the dark about who exactly is applying to build data centers in Texas, as well as how many are seeking approval. So far, the newspaper estimates there to be at least 335 data centers in the state and at least 248 planned ones. Hundreds more are in earlier development stages, queuing up to be allowed to be hooked up to the grid.

Many existing data centers are using on-site power generation, including pollutant-spewing diesel generators, to bypass the grid entirely.

The news comes as a vocal opposition to data center buildouts, driven by spiking electricity prices, dwindling water supplies, noise pollution, and an increase in emissions, continues to grow.

Some lawmakers have been pushing for tighter rules to keep all of these negative side effects in check. For now, many of them appear to be flying blind as companies race to open new facilities. Abbott claimed this week that some data centers failed to comply with a regulator survey for water and power usage, inspiring the most recent audit.

According to Texas state representative Brad Buckley, only 28 out of 377 companies that were surveyed by the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) issued responses, which he called “pretty pathetic” earlier this year.

More on data centers: The Number of Regular People Being Arrested for Protesting Data Centers Is Astounding

The post Texas Data Centers Suffer Brutal Collision With Reality appeared first on Futurism.