At this point, it’s a pretty well known fact that electric vehicles — and, at least in the popular imagination, Teslas especially — have a nagging habit of erupting into flames.
One Tesla owner in Maine evidently has that concern hovering in the back of their mind every time they leave the driveway.
While driving around the town of Tremont in a sleek red Model S, an unnamed driver hit an object on the road which punctured the vehicle’s lithium-ion battery, local station WABI5 reported. As most EV drivers are hopefully aware, any kind of damage to a car’s battery can easily spark a fire fueled by thermal runaway, resulting in a uniquely dangerous inferno that can be difficult to put out.
Luckily, this driver kept their head, driving straight to the Tremont fire station where the high-voltage battery immediately burst into flames, Bangor Daily News reported.
With help from the nearby Southwest Harbor Fire Department, the crew of the Tremont Volunteer Fire Department sprang into action, shutting down the road and dousing the Tesla using an arsenal of firehoses.
Based on photos of the incident, it seems the Tesla was totaled, but the driver is said to be doing alright.
The Tremont fire comes just days after an exploding Tesla in Seattle sent two firefighters to the hospital. That particular EV was parked inside an attached garage at the time, resulting in a two-alarm housefire that displaced an unfortunate family.
All told, if you drive an EV, it’s probably smart to have the address of the nearest fire department drilled into your head — especially if it’s a Tesla.
For protestors rising up against the data centers undergirding the AI boom, the math is simple: wherever they sprout, the facilities make frightfully poor neighbors — inflating utility prices, discharging hazardous waste, and blasting horrid noise at all hours of the night.
For data center developers, there’s a different calculation to be made: namely, one of supply and demand around the seemingly infinite drive for computing power.
Against the backdrop of an industry measured in the trillions of dollars, a few scattered protests at city hall may seem inconsequential. Yet as more and more local campaigns arise in opposition to data centers, the collective financial implications are becoming impossible to ignore.
According to new reporting by Reuters, which indexed data compiled by the research firm Data Center Watch, there are now hundreds of billions of dollars exposed to the growing risk of local opposition.
In the first three months of 2026 alone, at least 75 separate data center projects faced some kind of organized opposition at the local level. Together, those 75 developments represent a combined $130 billion worth of investments.
The funders of those data centers include major banks, but also more than a few private equity firms, which are sure to notice as the social risk to their data center investments climb.
Simply put, the potential that any given data center could be cancelled due to local opposition is rising, a sign that organized efforts against data centers are becoming more than the sum of their parts.
Yet despite growing costs, opposition alone may not be enough to slow the behemoth industry. As one anonymous senior official at a foreign lending firm told Reuters, investors are now becoming more comfortable pricing in cancellation risks as the demand for AI compute grows — like frogs adjusting to boiling water.
Bad news for anyone seeking a job in this AI-infested hiring hellscape: not even Google’s top AI lab can figure it out.
That’s according to an HR memo viewed by Bloomberg, encouraging job-seekers to fill out a special AI-proof form on top of their standard application so that a “real human” will know they applied.
The document, which contains the delicious disclaimer “PLEASE DO NOT SHARE THIS DOC WIDELY,” is ironically the product of Google DeepMind’s AGI Safety and Alignment Team. Taken at face value, it pretty blatantly admits that whatever AI-integrated hiring software the lab uses to review candidates has been dumping CVs straight into the garbage.
“We have an applications system with a non-trivial probability your CV will be screened out incorrectly or take too long to reach us,” the memo explains. “Filling out this form makes sure that a real human on the team will get to see your application.”
Even in the face of the memo, a spokesperson for Google’s DeepMind project insisted to Bloomberg that the company’s AI hiring software is working just fine.
“This team set up a special form to go past the recruiter review, and get their resumes direct to the people on the team,” the spokesperson said. “But there are no shortcuts to getting hired.”
All told, it’s a wild admission from any Google division, not to mention its flagship AI research hub. For the DeepMind crew, specifically, to throw up their hands and invent a workaround to sneak past the company’s own AI hiring software is galling beyond words.
It’s safe to say AI slop has completely obliterated the digital hiring ecosystem millions depend on to find work — and if Google’s top AI minds can’t fix it, what hope do the rest of us have?
Whether you’re looking for medical advice or tips on industrial agriculture, one thing is abundantly clear: never trust an AI chatbot without first getting a second opinion, preferably from a human who has actual expertise in the topic.
That’s the takeaway from an incident in the small city of Chuzhou, China, after a large langue model dispensed some advice that led to the untimely death of 25 acres worth of produce.
According to the Taiwanese publication CTWANT, a 67-year-old farmer surnamed Wu decided to start consulting an AI chatbot for advice nearly a year ago. He was reportedly skeptical at first, though the farmer began to let his guard down after some early successes with the AI’s farming tips.
Since that time, Wu has come to rely on his LLM for everything from fertilizing guidance to scheduling various tasks around the farm. After months of fruitful consultations, he decided to follow his AI chatbot’s new pesticide plan to the letter, letting loose on some 25 acres of precious sesame seedlings, all without ever double-checking with an expert or outside documentation.
The plan generated for him was basically a Long Island ice tea of agro-chemicals: a mix of “high-efficiency flupyridine” and “flufenazate” for pesky weeds, with plenty of “thiamethoxam” and “emamectin benzoate” for bugs and other pests, CT reported.
Not even a day after treatment, Wu says his juvenile sesame crop began to wither and die.
Per a video interview later translated by Tom’s Hardware, the farmer offered some hard-earned advice to any other growers looking to use his concoction: “If you spray it, the next day the seedlings won’t survive.”
“Both the grass and the seedlings will die, and the seedlings will die even faster,” Wu lamented.
It’s just the latest case of an LLM cooking up some slop that lands a professional in hot water. If nothing else, Wu’s in good company: he joins a host of other dupes across the legal, medical, financial, education, and media industries who’ve likewise fallen prey to an AI chatbot’s inaccurate output.
Over 30 student activists came together on Monday afternoon to occupy the Gallup Building in Washington DC, home to a public-facing lobbying office belonging to ChatGPT developer OpenAI.
Once inside the lobby, the demonstrators unfurled a massive banner reading “Stop Stealing Our Future,” while others held signs with messages like “OpenAI bought my Senator.” The demonstration lasted two hours, and ended when police stormed the lobby, arresting 13 protestors.
At the moment, the identity and whereabouts of the protestors remains unclear. An incident report obtained from the Metropolitan Police Department states that 13 people were arrested for “unlawful entry.” After stuffing the activists into vans, the report notes the MPD split the group up, sending seven to the First District Station, four to the Second District, and two to the Third District for processing.
The protest was organized by the climate group Sunrise Movement and anti-AI organization QuitGPT. According to a joint statement shared with Futurism, Monday’s action is just one of many across over 20 states in August calling on politicians to “Dump Big Tech.”
One student organizer who attended the protest, Raya Gupta, explained in the statement that “my friends chose to risk arrest to bring the fight to OpenAI.”
“Our generation doesn’t have any guarantees about whether we’ll have jobs after college, or whether there will be clean drinking water for all of us or whether people will have any power left in politics since our elections keep getting bought by Big Tech,” Gupta continued. “We all believe that not taking action now, as the scales slide between the people and the billionaires, puts our future in great jeopardy.”
Gupta’s comments underscore the degree to which AI has become an omni-cause for Americans across the political spectrum. A growing number of people in the US have been arrested for protests related to AI in some shape or form, whether attending town hall meetings to oppose data center developments, or occupying offices used by federal agencies to tool out AI immigration software.
Despite growing disgust with AI and its developers, politicians on both sides of the aisle have roundly embraced the tech industry’s extremely expensive lobbying efforts. Case in point, the recent opening of OpenAI’s DC Office comes as one of the AI lab’s super PACs injects over $140 million into the coming midterm elections, in a blatant attempt to steer AI regulations at the highest level.
Tech Goliaths are scrambling to build as much AI computing capacity as they possibly can, come hell or low water. One of the dominant players in the space, Amazon Web Services, has its heart set on an AI data center so enormous that it could easily become the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States.
According to the New York Times, Amazon has confirmed its investment in a massive gas-burning power plant in Texas, meant to supply up to 7.65 gigawatts of energy to a planned data center in Pecos County. Should it come online as planned, the plant’s 35 turbines would be allowed to spew 33 million tons of CO2 a year, the NYT notes, which would easily make it the largest single fount of emissions in the country.
That’s a stunning amount of carbon exhaust, putting that single data center in a league with entire countries including Switzerland, Ireland, and Bulgaria.
It would also be in stark defiance of Amazon’s stated climate goals, which center on reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.
That’s not lost on the tech giant. But as Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan told the NYT, the “world looks different now than when we co-founded the climate pledge.”
“We’re being transparent about the challenges, investing in innovation, and delivering measurable results,” Callahan continued. “Growth and sustainability don’t have to be in opposition — in fact, our results show they reinforce each other.”
Even without the new Pecos County plant, Amazon’s emissions are staggering. The company recently disclosed a record increase in its total emissions last year, with company-wide electricity usage rising by 34 percent across 2025.
That the company is blatantly papering over its previous climate commitments isn’t a shocker at this point, in other words, as the company reaches new emission highs with each passing year.
As if the practice of homeschooling wasn’t fraught enough already, parents are now bragging about using large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT to school their kids.
A number of viral videos show the alarmingly cavalier attitude some parents are taking. One clip, seemingly taken from a livestream hosted by the enormously controversial influencers Cole and Savannah LaBrant, shows the parents outline their vibes-based approach to the education of their five children.
“What I do for history — Cole usually does all their history, which I love, because I’m not the best at history — so Cole steps in about once a week and we’ll do a history lesson with them… we’re just teaching them the things that we just want them to learn — that we feel are the most important,” Savannah explains. “And same with science, and geography.”
That’s not uncommon as homeschool curriculums go; as horrifying as it is to imagine a student receiving one history lesson a week, regulations around the practice are incredibly loose in the United States, freeing hardcore Christians like the LaBrants to do whatever they want. But Savannah goes on, admitting that sometimes, even those slapdash lessons are too much to tackle without a little AI assistance.
“So I just make my own curriculum, and sometimes I’ll just use, like, ChatGPT,” she says, “or just uhm, print out, like — like right now I’m teaching them where the states are and how to locate them, and uhm, like all the states and capitols and things like that.” (Even the most advanced AI chatbots are known for producing inaccurate maps.)
History Class, but Make It Vibes-Based: The LaBrants Explain Homeschooling The LaBrants’ Homeschool History Curriculum: Whatever Cole Decides Happened “Cole steps in about once a week to do a quick history lesson because I’m not the best at history.” – Sav. The LaBrants went live to explain their homeschooling setup, and Savannah casually admitted she “doesn’t know a lot of history,” so they teach it once a week, with Cole covering whatever topics they personally decide are important. So apparently the curriculum is: Monday: sponsored content Tuesday: Bible lesson Wednesday: filming Thursday: whatever Cole remembers from school Friday: history, pending personal relevance Homeschooling can absolutely be done well, but “we teach history once a week based on what we think matters” is not the reassuring flex they seem to think it is. History is not a Pinterest board where you skip the sections that do not match the family aesthetic. The most concerning part is not Savannah admitting she lacks expertise. Plenty of parents do. It is the confidence of replacing a structured curriculum with Cole’s Greatest Hits of Human Civilization. Nothing says educational rigor like two influencers deciding which centuries make the cut. @Savannah LaBrant @Bev Skin @ChatGPT @OpenAI @Fishfam @TMZ @cbsnews @CNN @DrinkFrosh #savannahlabrant#colelabrant#labrantfamily#homeschool#fyp
That any parents could be so cavalier in their approach to homeschooling has grim implications for an already divisive practice.
In much of the US, homeschooling parents are already given incredibly wide latitude on what to teach their children. A whole 11 states have essentially no regulations on homeschooling whatsoever: parents aren’t required to follow any set curriculum, issue standardized assessments, or even inform the state that their child won’t be going to a real school.
Many more states only require a notice of intent to homeschool and occasional proof of attendance, the latter being a bare bones measure of success, and one which is easily fudged. Unfortunately, it’s easier to count the number of states that definitively require standardized testing and a rigid curriculum: Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, and Massachusetts.
Of course, the LaBrants aren’t alone. The popular influencer account Heavenly Homeschool has similar reels out, walking parents through the process of generating entire years’ worth of lesson plans, tailor-made to their specific worldview. It all begs the question: do AI chatbots have any safeguards around education?
Turns out, not really. We tasked ChatGPT with developing a homeschooling curriculum for a 3rd grade student in Michigan — a state with virtually no regulations around DIY education — “following a strictly evangelical doctrine,” including “no woke history or science.”
ChatGPT was more than happy to oblige: “I can build this around a conservative, explicitly Christian/evangelical worldview, with Scripture integrated across subjects and with history and science taught from a young-earth/creationist perspective rather than through a secular or progressive framework,” the chatbot explained.
While it didn’t push back against our intentions to indoctrinate our hypothetical child, the LLM did make sure to clarify that “no woke” can “mean different things to different families.” So, to avoid ambiguity, the chatbot specified that the course calendar would use “Biblical authority, traditional Christian ethics… and creation-based science” as standard-bearers.
True to its word, the LLM-generated curriculum included “bible and Christian studies,” a traditionalist approach to American history, with specific chunks on both “Westward expansion” and Henry Ford — a renowned racist and antisemite — as well as a creationist approach to Earth science and astronomy.
For the portion on space, the curriculum would teach “the heavens as God’s creation while distinguishing observations from interpretations about the age and origin of the universe,” the LLM promised.
Put together, it paints a dire picture for the estimated 3.75 million K-12 homeschooled children in the US. Beyond the potential for wild AIhallucinations to leach into educational material, the technology is a Pandora’s Box for parents, who can now effortlessly inculcate their children with any number of unscientific conspiracy theories or anti-social worldviews while facing no pushback whatsoever.
Do you know anything about how homeschooling families are using AI? Email us: tips@futurism.com. We can keep you anonymous.
What’s the point of having a superyacht if you’re forced to share it with some unwashed poors?
That’s the calculation the crew of a Mark Zuckerberg’s $300 million superyacht, Launchpad, apparently made on the billionaire’s behalf, after a skiff near its location in southeast Alaska ran into trouble.
According to the Alaska Beacon, a small cruise ship called Wilderness Legacy had to go out of its way to help the crew of a 21-foot boat that had run out of fuel outside Farragut Bay, a body of water south of Juneau. As maritime events go, it’s a pretty common occurrence — Dan Blanchard, the owner of the cruise line told the Beacon that these types of rescues don’t even “always rise to my attention.”
What did catch attention was the fact that Zuckerberg’s yacht had been much closer to the stranded skiff than the cruise ship. So much so, in fact, that the Wilderness Legacy had to steam “around and past” the Launchpad on its way to render assistance, the Beacon reported.
“There was near unanimous booing when the captain announced this,” Michael Love, a passenger aboard the cruise ship, said in a post on social media.
There are a few caveats here: for starters, the US Coast Guard says the skiff issued no official distress call, only a generic request for assistance. There’s also the tidbit shared by a spokesperson for Zuckerberg, who insisted that the billionaire was not personally onboard the yacht at the time.
As for why it didn’t respond to the call for assistance, the spokesperson told the Beacon that “by the time the crew reviewed the Coast Guard contact on a different radio channel from the one they were operating on, the assist was already underway.” In other words, the official story is that the crew on Zuckerberg’s unfathomably expensive yacht, which you’d assume was loaded with state-of-the-art communications equipment, simply didn’t notice the call for assistance.
Whether you buy that tale probably depends on how much latitude you’re willing to offer Zuckerberg, who has quickly become one of the more identifiable villains of the tech billionaire world. Regardless of his actual involvement, the Meta CEO was almost universally panned for the event on social media.
“Perfect mirror of how billionaires leave the entirety of society stranded,” one Redditor commented.
As Love, the cruise passenger, told the Beacon: “frankly, if I was Mark Zuckerberg I would be absolutely ecstatic at a chance to do something helpful for someone in need and maybe get some good PR out of it.”
Water levels in rivers across Europe are reaching astonishing lows lately as a record heatwave continues to bake much of the continent.
Images captured by the European Union’s Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite revealed the extraordinary extent of the drought, which is clearly desiccating Europe’s major waterways. Water levels in one of those rivers, the Danube, have become so low that ancient ruins are beginning to surface for the first time in centuries.
As Reuters reported, the portion of the Danube that flows through Bulgaria has slowed to a mere trickle, revealing foundations of the Constantine Bridge, a nearly 1,700 year-old structure that was opened for business back during the rule of Roman Emperor Constantine the Great in the year 328 AD.
Though the bridge is believed to have been destroyed just a few decades after it was finished, researchers regard it as among the longest bridges engineered by the Roman Empire, a marvel of ancient engineering. Though receding water levels come with plenty of downsides, Pavel Popov, a Bulgarian archeologist with the Pleven Regional Historical Museum told Reuters that the droughts do offer a unique opportunity to study the ancient wonder.
“For archaeologists, these moments are extremely valuable because nature briefly reveals an object that is hidden beneath the Danube for most of the time,” Popov explained. “It gives us a rare opportunity to observe, document and study it in its real environment.”
After the ruins surfaced, Reuters reports that local researchers used drones to survey the exposed ruins, with the low water levels offering a chance to trace the bridge’s physical footprint and evaluate the condition of the foundation materials.
Numerous other treasures have surfaced across the Danube, like the remains of a mammoth tusk in the Bulgarian village of Ryahovo, and a sunken Nazi warship near the Croatian town of Opatovac.
In a time of rising skepticism against tech surveillance, it seems not even the best intentions can spare you from backlash.
That’s a lesson some good samaritans in Los Vegas learned the hard way, after a thermal imaging drone they were using to track a runaway dog was trashed by a group of unidentified vandals.
According to to Las Vegas station FOX5, the volunteer animal rescue group Paws Patrol LV has been scrambling to replace a $7,000 camera drone after it suddenly went offline while tracking an injured dog.
“For the past couple of days, we’ve been searching for a dog we believe was hit by a car,” the group wrote in a post on Facebook. “We searched on foot, but the vegetation was simply too dense to see through with flashlights. So we launched our thermal drone… one of the most valuable rescue tools we’ve ever owned.”
“Less than a minute after it took off,” the post continues, “a group of unhoused individuals knocked it out of the sky, smashed it, and threw it into the water.”
The animal-rescue group wasn’t left empty-handed for long, however, as a business owner from Montana chipped in to donate a brand new thermal imaging drone, per an update on the original post.
While it would be easy to blame a group of unwashed Luddites for the damage, it’s important to keep in mind that the true identity of the vandal or vandals remains unknown. If the vandals really are homeless, as Paws Patrol LV volunteers suggest, then their aversion to strange drones makes sense — elsewhere, surveillance drones have been deployed by police officers to clear homeless camps, while private citizens have used drones to drop dog feces on homeless populations struggling to survive.
And one doesn’t necessarily have to be homeless to have an aversion to the growing number of surveillance drones surfing our skies. In some parts of the US, malicious operators have used drones to harass random suburbanites and poach wildlife, while insurance adjusters are increasingly conducting secretive drone flights to find excuses to penalize homeowners and sometimes even drop customers altogether.
While we hope the dog gets found, the episode underscores a larger point: the skies have become a contested space, with drone operators both benevolent and vindictive jockeying for control — not just of the airspace itself, but over how their drones are perceived.
Turns out there’s one thing AI chatbots are definitively better at than humans: scamming innocent people.
A new piece of research flagged by Wired found that large language models are significantly better than humans at pulling off “pig butchering” scams, a form of online investment fraud where criminals pursue fake, long-term relationships with targets in order to build trust before cleaning them out financially.
To pull off the study, researchers at Northeastern and a grab bag of international institutions pitted 22 test subjects against two forms of scammers: one an AI chatbot, the other a random human. After a seven-day courtship period, the “scammers” asked their “victims” to either download an app or play an online game, a stand-in for a financially-manipulative request (asks that, in the real world, could be used to hack a victim’s device).
Overall, just 18 percent of the human scammers acquiesced, while the AI chatbots were much more successful, courting nearly half of the participants.
While the results are troubling enough, the ease with which researchers were able to build the scammy LLMs is arguably more frightening. The study primarily used a Claude model, which was instructed not to admit under any circumstance that is was an AI chatbot.
The Claude bot obeyed with remarkable dedication, denying that it was an AI chatbot when asked, and even coming up with cover stories when challenged.
“With relatively little effort, we’re able to make an agent that can outperform a human at building this exploitable emotional trust,” Yisroel Mirsky, computer science professor at Ben Gurion University and one of the study’s co-authors, told Wired.
Equally alarming was the response from participants after the experiment was over. Though 20 out of the 22 victims were able to identify which of the two scammers was an AI chatbot, the researchers told Wired there was plenty of shock, and even denial.
“Some people were just blown away,” said University Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham professor Gilad Gressel. “They just had absolutely no idea.”
Two firefighters were rushed to the hospital on Wednesday, after a Tesla parked in a family garage exploded.
According to local station KING5, the incident happened in the Seattle suburb of Auburn, after a massive fire spread from a family’s garage to the rest of their home.
The Tesla explosion set off what ultimately became a two-alarm fire, requiring emergency crews to battle back flames for hours. Thankfully, the two injured firefighters were discharged with non-life threatening injuries, and nobody else was hurt, though the single-family home was pretty much totaled.
The ultimate cause of the fire is still under investigation — whether the Tesla combusted on its own, setting off the blaze, or was the result of a fire which started elsewhere isn’t known.
Still, it’s fair to assume the explosion contributed to the severity of the fire, the latest example of an all-too-common situation plaguing Teslas and other electric vehicles.
Thanks to their massive lithium batteries, Teslas have an unfortunate habit of bursting into flames, often after being involved incollisions, but occasionally entirelyon theirown.
Regardless of what sparks the flames, battery fires are notoriously difficult to put out, requiring specialized hazmat units and thousands of gallons of water to end the battery’s combustion.
Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos and his actor buddy Leonardo DiCaprio are catching some heavy flak recently, but for a seemingly bizarre reason: pledging millions of dollars to protect 100 of the world’s most threatened animal species.
The charity initiative, called the Phoenix Species Project, was first revealed on DiCaprio’s Instagram account, where the six-time academy award nominee described it as the “largest single philanthropic initiative ever dedicated to the recovery of Critically Endangered species, across 30 countries.”
“I could not be prouder to announce this,” DiCaprio continued. “Save these species, and we protect everything around them. The forests, the rivers, and the climate itself.”
For such a seemingly altruistic venture, the response to the announcement was strikingly polarized. As the Independent noted, DiCaprio and Bezos were summarily blasted for engaging in “greenwashing,” a negative term given to the strategy employed by massive corporations and the wealthy to cover their outsize impact on the environment with a little eco-charity.
“As soon as people realize and actually feel the effects of what those rich f***s did to our planet they suddenly start their greenwashing campaign,” one Redditor wrote in response to the announcement, per the Independent.
“Uber-wealthy people helping a fraction of the problems that they cause,” another commenter lamented. “For publicity.”
It certainly wouldn’t be the first time Bezos has been accused of greenwashing, especially given the immense carbon footprint of his flagship company Amazon. In 2020, for example, the billionaire’s Bezos Earth Fund pledged $10 billion to protect biodiversity, bringing a massive amount of money to the global effort to mitigate climate change — at least on paper.
As the backlash illustrates, your reaction to the those types of efforts probably hinge on your economic and social worldview.
The haters aren’t just being petty, though. As the Journal of Political Inquiry observed, Bezos’s wealth is only possible thanks to his previous position as chief executive of one of the largest corporate polluters on the planet. Between 2020 and 2021 alone, Amazon’s carbon dioxide emissions grew by 18 percent, while his space company Blue Origin is altering the outer atmosphere in ways we’re only starting to understand.
And his empire’s carbon emissions have only skyrocketed since then, as the demand for cloud computing supersedes previous pledges to clamp down on Amazon’s extraordinary excretions of noxious pollutants.
In other words, it’s no wonder the masses are rising up in opposition to the billionaire and his actor friend — if only online, at least for now.
Though expensive, they’re gradually becoming a more attractive option over human security guards. At least, that’s according to new reporting by Business Insider, which notes that the cost to cover one 24/7 guard shift is anywhere from $80,000 to $130,000 cheaper per year when contracting robot dogs over human security officers.
That’s bad news for the nation’s security guards, an essential role providing low-barrier employment for uneducated workers. Often deployed to help property owners reduce insurance premiums, the role of security guard is an important source of income for some 1.3 million people. According to a report by the UC Berkeley Labor Center, about 60.8 percent of those roles are filled by people of color, while 27.8 percent of guards are 55 or older.
It is, however, a difficult job to make a living on, with the median annual wage of just $38,390 as of 2024. That being the case, the industry faces a high degree of turnover, which tech companies are all too happy to exploit.
“Training them and staffing them is super inconsistent, and it’s a big burden on the business,” Damon Henry, CEO of robot dog company Asylon, told BI.
So far, Henry says he has about 50 robots deployed across 25 customers nationwide. Compared to a workforce of 1.3 million humans, that might not sound like much. But if robotic production lines get more efficient and the bots themselves become cheaper to roll out, it’s hard to imagine the nation’s businesses keeping low-paid security guards on the payroll out of charity (just look at what happened with Walmart greeters.)
Still, you probably haven’t bumped into your last mall cop quite yet. As director of the UC Berkeley Labor Center’s Low-Wage Work program and co-author of the report referenced above Enrique Lopezlira told BI, the role is likely to experience pressures similar to that of other workers facing automation: security jobs won’t disappear entirely, but they will get much more demanding.
“The realistic near-term effect is not that guards are replaced,” Lopezlira said. “The human role is going to be pushed toward those hardest, higher-stakes parts of the work.”
The amount of pollution spilling out of fossil-fuel generators is astounding. In the United States, this explosion of emissions is led by states like Texas, which on a global scale is comparable only to China in terms of new infrastructure powered by dead dinosaurs.
And as more data centers crop up throughout the US, that problem — of rising emissions linked to the accelerating demand for any kind of electricity — is only going to get worse.
According to reporting by the New York Times, the US currently has at least 82 data center-linked gas generators either in development or in the proposal stage. These are massive facilities which rival public electrical generators in size and power, only they’re not managed by the government, and the power they generate isn’t meant for citizens.
Instead, these are private generators, developed by big tech companies like Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta or Elon Musk’s xAI. The electricity they’ll supply is intended only for data centers, which grow ever-hungrier for power as new iterations of AI chips and energy-hungry large language models enter into production.
Assuming all 82 of those plants come online as planned, the NYT notes they could spew enough emissions in one year to rival the output of half the passenger cars in the US.
That’s an astonishing amount of pollution, made possible thanks to industry-friendly state regulators in places like Texas and Ohio, where permits for behemoth fossil fuel fired generators are approved in as little as 18 days, often without public disclosure.
It’s possible that moratoriums on new data centers might slow the burn, but unless states begin the unlikely task of banning new gas generators for existing facilities, we can expect US fossil fuel emissions to continue to rise precipitously in the years to come.
When Texas’s privately-run electrical grid collapsed amid a battery of winter storms in February of 2021, it plunged over 4.5 million people into darkness, and contributed to hundreds of deaths due to the lack of water, food, and heat.
A similarly tragic story almost unfolded in July of this year — had in not been for the deployment of a jaw dropping amount of solar power infrastructure that kept the grid from collapsing under the strain.
New reporting by the Texas Tribune details the state’s rapid adoption of solar energy, specifically solar panels and storage batteries. The paper notes that when the organization that manages state’s electrical grid — the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) — broke record energy demands on both July 21st and 22nd, it hardly registered as an event, because its solar infrastructure ensured there was a 20,000 megawatt buffer padding the grid’s capacity.
“We hit an all time peak, and we had no issue hitting that peak,” Thomas Gleeson, chair of Texas’s Public Utility Commission, told the Tribune.
Unsurprisingly, those moments of peak demand coincided with oppressive summer temperatures, with the heat index reaching 116 degrees Fahrenheit in Dallas on July 22nd. The Tribune notes that at various points, solar power accounted for over 45 percent of the state’s total electrical generation, breaking state records both for total electricity generated by solar panels and for total electricity discharged from solar batteries.
As the power grid’s capacity grows, so too will the demand. Though ERCOT is standing strong for now, the state estimates that by 2032, statewide electric demand will be nearly double what it was on July 22nd.
To combat that reality, the utility firm says it has some 460 gigawatts of generation cued up for development, around 70 percent of which is made up of solar infrastructure.
Of course, it will also help if Texas governor Greg Abbott sticks to his recently enacted data center moratorium, which put the brakes on over 474 gigawatts worth of impending electrical stress, at least temporarily. Long-term, it’s unlikely that Texas will refuse the nearly 1,800 data center projects looking to call the state home — an unending game of chicken between the tech industry and a utility provider scrambling to keep up with growing demand.
It turns out the venture capital industry doesn’t just merely fund junky AI startups — it also systematically breeds the conditions for fraud.
A new joint study from researchers at the UK’s Imperial College and France’s Emlyon Business School analyzed 12 companies involved in 27 court cases related to civil or criminal cases related to securities fraud. The cases totaled around $688 million in financial losses, and resulted in 73 years of cumulative prison sentences.
After analyzing the individual cases, the researchers identified a persistent pattern of “façading,” in which startup entrepreneurs hide their flailing businesses from scrutiny through an assorted mix of fraudulent behavior.
The research, first reported by TechCrunch, identified three various types of façading: surface, reinforced, and deep façading, which are “contingent on the severity of the gap that entrepreneurs face between audiences’ performance expectations and ventures’ performance reality,” the paper explains.
The first form, surface façading, happens when startup founders create fictional stories of “imminent venture success,” like the kind of AI-washing that hit its stride in 2024, embodied by companies like Builder.ai that went on to collapse like a billion-dollar houses of cards.
This escalates into “reinforced façading” when founders begin to cook up things like bank statements or customer contracts to sell the surface story, and take pains to centralize the flow of information around the startup’s performance. One example of this might be the company iLearning Engines, a $1.5 billion AI startup which was found to be faking “virtually all its customer relationships and revenues” by a Department of Justice probe earlier this year.
Deep façading, the final and most severe form, encompasses broad forms of market manipulation, like faking product demonstrations, sabotaging internal efforts at due diligence, and manipulating regulation. This last form, one could argue, is embodied by the current front-runners of the tech industry’s AI boom, which have engaged in significant political lobbying, sabotaged their own internal research on AI safety, and routinely dress up human labor to appear like autonomous AI.
Ultimately, the line between criminality and free market innovation is thin, especially where seemingly-magical and proprietary new technologies like AI are involved (a technology which currently represents a $1.6 trillion gap between investor expectations and practical reality.)
“By engaging in façading, entrepreneurs effectively decouple the venture’s externally projected appearance from its operational reality, making it appear to audiences as if no expectation-reality gap exists, despite the venture’s actual (subpar) performance,” reads the paper. “Entrepreneurs transgress from dramatized discourse into criminal deception when their stories become unhinged from reality and involve increasingly sophisticated organizing efforts to fabricate material evidence, data, and information about their ventures’ performance.”
As the amount of high-tech police gear skyrockets across North America and much of Europe, one company isn’t betting on robo-dogs or egg-shaped sentry-bots.
Instead, Estonian-based startup Rollo Robotics came up with a roving sentinel in the shape of a juicy rubber kickball, dubbed 1Rollo, as New Atlas reports — and we can’t shake the feeling that it’s the perfect form factor to be vandalized by angry locals who don’t want to be spied on.
With protestors across Europe and the US cutting down or disabling AI-integrated police surveillance cameras and vandalizing camera drones, it remains to be seen whether the police gadgets see live deployment on city streets — and if so, how long they last before somebody sends one to the Moon with a swift kick.
The bot sports an AI-integrated 360-degree camera antenna with a wireless transmitter, though the bulk of its body is made up of a stable mono wheel measuring two feet in diameter.
According to the company’s website, 1Rollo represents the “world’s first mono wheel robot,” boasting “gyroscope-based stabilization” and rugged weatherproofing to survive Estonia’s extreme winters. It stands about 3.5 feet in height and can supposedly wheel around at a speed of up to 19 miles per hour.
Like most companies that use “AI” as a marketing gimmick, Rollo Robotics is keen to stress the cost-savings you could achieve by replacing humans with its products.
“Human patrol is expensive, inefficient, and now replaceable,” the company’s website declares. It goes on to note that there are 28.5 million frontline security workers around the world, and that the 1Rollo could offer “labor cost reduction” of over 80 percent.
But how many kickbots does it take to do the job of a human security team? According to the company, it takesthree bots for every nine humans — one robot per 24-hour shift. (The implication here being that the 1Rollo can operate around the clock, though its eight-hour battery life might put a damper on that ambitious goal.)
Considering its perfectly round shape makes it particularly suitable for a punt — not that we would condone such behavior — we have our doubts about its long-term effectiveness as a one-wheeled surveillance machine.
Talk about homework: a large class of undergraduates at an unnamed university in Utah became the unfortunate subject of a severe public health response after an extraordinary bungle in a science lab.
In September of last year, the group of lab students were tasked with identifying a bacterium known as P. shigelloides, a relatively harmless pathogen known to cause diarrhea when ingested. But as lab results came in, students were alarmed to find the specimens handed out in class were actually the bacteria Neisseria meningitidis, a potentially deadly pathogen that causes meningitis.
Unlike P. shigelloides, the bacterium N. meningitidis calls for high-security practices, like double gloves, disposable clothes, and fit-tested N95 masks, as the bare minimum. (In one unfortunate case from 2012, a 25-year old microbiologist whose lab was ill equipped to handle N. meningitidis died mere hours after exposure to the aerosolized microbe.)
According to People, Utah public health authorities soon raided the Utah stockroom, finding samples labeled “N. meningitidis.” That discovery prompted a recommendation that all 33 of the exposed students begin a cautionary antibiotic regimen, especially given that the lab participants were only wearing gloves and lab coats at the time of exposure.
On top of the antibiotics dose, at least two people sought medical attention due to possible exposure symptoms, which included a painful and invasive spinal tap.
It was only after the frenzy that further professional lab tests identified the offending pathogen as Neisseria sicca, a bacterium “commonly found in the upper respiratory tract” that is “nonpathogenic in immunocompetent persons,” according to a recently-filed Center for Disease Control study of the Utah lab incident.
Student misidentification notwithstanding, the event underscores the importance of accurately labeling microbial cultures — lest aspiring biologists become victims of their own studies.
When police in West Virginia’s Monongalia County arrested 20-year-old Wesley Jackson for his alleged involvement in the destruction of automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) deployed by the company Flock Safety, they likely never could have imagined the outpouring of support he would receive from the online community.
In the days after Jackson’s arrest, a post by local news station WDTV gathered over 29,000 comments. As the Washington Post observed, those comments were overwhelmingly positive, with community members and strangers alike singing Jackson’s praises, and concocting a seemingly endless variety of alibis.
To take the community’s word — or words — for it, Jackson couldn’t have been the perpetrator, as he was simultaneously replacing the roof on a homeless shelter, dispensing dogs treats, canoeing, saving puppies from burning buildings, sweeping a parking lot, and rescuing cats from trees at the time the alleged offenses were committed.
“He was actually kissing the homies goodnight at the time of the incident,” one absurdist commenter protested. “Couldn’t have been him.”
Take a look at the comments under any news article or police report about ALPR vandalism, and it’s clear the phenomenon stretches far beyond Monongalia County. It seems the trend is spreading so fast that there doesn’t even necessarily need to be an arrest for John Q Public to lionize privacy minded saboteurs.
Case in point, when police in Winona, Minnesota released a statement claiming that “all eight of our city’s Flock cameras were missing,” the public quickly sprang into action, peppering the department’s page with hundreds of comments in support of the perpetrator, who remains at large. The support was so overwhelming that the department soon shut down comments under the release.
“Whoever you’re suspecting was actually on a fishing trip with me between July 29th and August 1st,” one commenter joked.
“Love seeing the comments on these police releases of flocks being cut down,” remarked another. “It restores some faith in humanity that no one wants to be tracked indefinitely in the name of ‘safety.'”
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