Will AI supercharge the economy? Will the data centers powering it bring prosperity and provide paying jobs to the communities they’re built in?

Probably not. New research shows that rapid rise of AI has instead coincided with “unusually high levels” of unemployment among college graduates in Texas, the Financial Times reports. Texas, crucially, is the state with the most data center under construction.

Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas found that job postings in the state had dramatically fallen for AI-exposed fields since the release of ChatGPT, disproportionately affecting college graduates. By the first quarter of 2025, postings plummeted by 8 percent compared to jobs that were deemed less exposed to AI, it also found.

“These dynamics suggest that recent college graduates, whose unemployment rate rose to unusually high levels during this period of rapid [generative AI] adoption, are where the effects of GenAI on employment and earnings are likely to first appear,” the researchers wrote in the analysis, as quoted by the FT.

Until recently, Texas and its governor Greg Abbott has embraced the AI data center buildout with open arms. A recent Reuters analysis found that requests from data centers and other large power users to connect to the state’s power grid soared from about 48 gigawatts in 2023 to more than 474 gigawatts currently, making it one of the fastest growing hubs for AI and cloud computing facilities.

But as public backlash against data centers has continued to mount — and with midterm elections looming — Abbott changed his tune and became an AI industry critic, announcing a freeze on new data center connections last month. Along with the myriad concerns around the data center’s environmental impact, many fear that the technology that the data centers support will destroy jobs, while the facilities themselves provide little for local economies. 

The latest research, its authors say, demonstrates the reality of how AI is shaping labor demand in the very area that should be directly benefiting from it.

It’s not the only research suggesting AI is wiping out entry level jobs — an outcome that industry figures like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have warned would happen.

A recent analysis by researchers at Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab similarly found a marked decline in employment among young knowledge-workers, while the headcount of those working in fields not considered vulnerable to AI automation, including industrial and retail work, rose.

“For 22 to 25 year olds, employment is falling in the most AI-exposed jobs and rising in the least exposed jobs,” one of the report authors said.

There’s still a lot of uncertainty around how many jobs are truly being replaced by AI, and whether some of the chaos can be explained as AI being used as an excuse to fire workers for other reasons. But it’s brought a demoralizing effect on the workforce. In a Gallup poll conducted over the final three months of 2025, 72 percent of respondents said it was a “bad time” to find a good job. 

More on AI: Employees Absolutely Loath AI in the Workplace, Survey Finds

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At this point, the AI economy is like a drunk guy who managed to mount a tiger. Though nothing about the current situation is ideal, there’s no clear way to hop off without ensuring certain doom at the hands of a large, angry cat.

So it goes with AI: though the ridiculous cost of data centers demands a seemingly exponential amount of capital, the rest of the economy would be in freefall without it — so better to stay atop the tiger, on the unlikely chance that this chaotic approach somehow domesticates our large furry friend.

As far as productivity goes, the great AI boom has failed to generate even a fraction of the economic returns sought by institutional investors. Despite that pesky reality, they’ve gone all-in on the tech industry, leveraging every possible asset — including the country’s retirement savings — on the biggest gamble of the 21st century.

Yet if things continue at their current pace — if we manage to stay atop the tiger — we might someday find ourselves looking back at 2026 wondering how we ever had it so good.

According to a new analysis by accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and spotted by Bloomberg, global spending on data centers could reach an astounding $31.6 trillion by 2050, with over $15 trillion of that concentrated in the US.

And that’s a middle-of-the-road prediction. If productive AI adoption happens to pick up beyond its current middling level, according to the analysis, AI spending could rise as high as $50 trillion over the next two and a half decades.

Whether that kind of spending is actually possible seems unclear. Even PwC, which takes a decidedly optimistic view of the future, is careful to condition its forecast: “although an enormous amount of funding is required to meet mounting compute needs from a widening set of users, capital should be available in sufficient quantities” (emphasis added.)

Unfortunately, it seems there’s no other choice at this point but to hold onto the tiger for dear life. As a shocking chart by the Wall Street Journal illustrates, the amount of capital spent on non-data center construction in the US has quite literally fallen off a cliff, while the capital deployed to build data centers soars into the stratosphere.

With the cost of debt swelling amidst skyrocketing inflation, it’s unclear how our inebriated jockey is going to hold his grip for the next year — let alone the far-away date of 2050.

More on data centers: Panicking Tech Execs Try to Pivot Message on AI Data Centers

The post As the Rest of the Economy Crumbles, the Amount of Money Flooding Into Data Centers Is Simply Astounding appeared first on Futurism.

When the long awaited role playing game “Fallout 4” dropped in 2015, it marked the first installation in the franchise in five years. The release quickly became a running joke, with working class gamers yukking it up over their plans to call in sick the day it hit store shelves, and the game’s developer even issuing a bogus doctor’s note.

Now history seems to be repeating itself — and this time for almost certainly the most hyped game ever, making its release an actual liability for economy-wide productivity.

Enter “Grand Theft Auto VI,” the first installation in the beloved GTA franchise in 13 years. With nearly 5 million pre-orders worldwide, the game’s release on November 19 is poised to take a sizable chunk of the working population with it, a phenomenon tantamount to an unofficial holiday, as the Wall Street Journal tells it.

“We’ve got a couple of days where we’re like, ‘daddy’s very busy,'” Bud Burruss, a software engineer and father of three told the WSJ. When the game drops, Burruss said he plans on taking five whole days to himself.

“I’m not going to be playing it for, like, 20 hours straight like an absentee father,” the software engineer explained. “But right out of the gate we’re going hard. I’ll have the cave door shut.”

“It has been rescheduled so many times that I’m like, you know what, if we are for sure doing this on Nov 19, I’m taking Thursday to Thursday off,” medical sales rep Anna Ray told the WSJ.

What the overall hit to workplace productivity looks like remains to be seen, but given the astronomical hype around GTA VI, it sure won’t be zero. While there are the immediate lost work-hours to consider, there’s also the long-term effect to workplace productivity to consider even after gamers return to work.

According to one analysis based on a survey of 2,000 gamers, late-night gaming sessions contribute to a two-hour drop in the next day’s productivity on average.

On the other hand, given that we live in a time of record corporate profits amidst brutally sluggish wages, maybe the least managers can do is let their faithful workers enjoy a day or five of uninterrupted gaming bliss.

More on video games: AI Bro Convinced He Can Vibe Code GTA 6 Before the Real One Comes Out

The post Bosses Concerned That GTA 6 Release Will Cause Massive Drop in Productivity appeared first on Futurism.

How is the MENA region’s clean power market evolving amid growing energy security concerns? Learn how record solar, wind and storage additions are reshaping the region’s energy mix and driving investment.

Former Republican congressman and ironic meme icon George Santos was just banned from Kalshi — for life.

It’s the first lifetime ban that the prediction market has ever handed out, the New York Times reports, which is pretty incredible considering all the inside trading that’s suspected to happen on the platform. There was pretty much nothing “suspected” about Santos’ offenses, though, which were about as blatant as they come.

According to a notice Kalshi posted this week, Santos placed multiple bets on markets related to his attendance of president Donald Trump’s State of the Union address in February this year. 

Needless to say, “as a person capable of influencing the outcome of the underlying event, Santos was prohibited from trading in this market,” the notice explained.

He then began making public statements about attending the event to influence the price of the contracts. Some of those statements were “false or misleading.”

Just days before the address, for example, Santos posted a video on X saying, “I’m going to be there for the State of Union in the gallery, guys,” before writing a follow-up telling his followers he was stuck in an airport, watching it on TV.

“FML,” he added.

Santos’s unsubtle market-moving utterances were successful at manipulating the price of the “Yes or No” contracts he purchased, Kalshi’s Compliance Department found. All told, he made nearly $18,000 in profit from the scheme.

Santos won’t see the inside of a cell, but he is getting a heavy slap on the wrist. Kalshi fined him $71,356, and it also flagged the bets to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The federal agency ordered Santos to return all the profits he made as part of a settlement both parties reached in July, and slapped him with its own $17,500 fine for good measure. 

Anyone familiar with Santos’s antics won’t be surprised by this latest one. The 38-year-old is a notorious fabulist and con artist. He was expelled from Congress in 2023 after an ethics investigation, following the discovery by news outlets that he’d embezzled campaign funds and had lied heavily in his biography. In 2024, he plead guilty to wire fraud and identity theft. His seven year sentence was commuted by — who else — Trump last year.

Ironically, Santos used to be a paid ambassador for Polymarket, Kalshi’s biggest rival. Polymarket dropped him like a hot potato, though, once the CFTC began poking into his suspicious Kalshi bets.

The ban and hefty fines haven’t caused him to lose his spunk, though.

“Hey @Kalshi thanks for the lifetime ban from your gambling platform,” Santos wrote on X. “Let’s see how much longer you guys are around for.”

More on prediction markets: Insider Trading on Polymarket Is Revealing Military Secrets

The post Kalshi Just Issued Its First-Ever Lifetime Ban to the Funniest Person You Can Possibly Imagine appeared first on Futurism.

As backlash against surveillance grows, governments overseeing cities, townships, and counties around the US are dropping their Flock contracts at a record pace — a retreat so widespread that some say it could affect the company’s viability.

The police tech company, known for its sprawling network of automatic license plate readers (ALPRs), has become one of the flashpoints for the country’s revulsion at AI infrastructure, joining data centers and drone-as-first-responder programs as symbols — and targets — of a rising AI dystopia.

According to reporting by TechSpot, some 214 municipal governments have opted to drop previously-held contracts with Flock since 2021.

That data comes courtesy of Secure Justice, an anti-surveillance group based out of Oakland, California. Just across August, Secure Justice analysis found that some 90 local administrations dropped or non-renewed Flock contracts, quadruple the number of cancellations across July, and a rate of three per day across the whole month.

And as cancellations increase, the hit to Flock’s collective utility — not to mention the company’s bottom line — only becomes more pronounced. That’s because Flock offers police the ability to reference data collected by ALPRs belonging not only to other law enforcement agencies, but also to commercial and individual contractees as well.

Recent history has shown that when Flock cameras in neighboring towns go down, police become much more likely to cancel or non-renew their own contracts, as the main utility for law enforcement comes from the combined network, rather than just those ALPRs local to one jurisdiction (granted, police officers have often used that network to stalk women instead of actually fighting crime, but that’s another story.)

Though Flock told TechSpot its new contracts still outnumber its cancelled contracts at a rate of 10 to one, privacy activists are more focused on the cumulative effects rising cancellations will have in the long term.

“When you see that now 165 [cancellations] are just in the first almost eight months of this year… At that speed, if it goes another year, we’re talking serious money,” Secure Justice executive director Brain Hofer told TechSpot. “That number is going to get huge, fast.”

More on Flock: Police Use Surveillance Cameras to Narc On Guy Who Found $30 on the Ground

The post Flock Is in Major Trouble appeared first on Futurism.

It’s no secret that AI is becoming increasingly unpopular around the world, as the tech’s garbled output has become impossible for the average person to avoid. For a rising cohort of workers, AI is also becoming inescapable on the job. According to one piece of research, staffers aren’t exactly thrilled with that reality.

The new survey, conducted by the Indeed-owned workplace review site Glassdoor, found that mentions of “AI” in employer reviews has skyrocketed over the last few years — though sentiments, tellingly, are becoming overwhelmingly negative as time goes on.

Since 2019 when Glassdoor first began tracking references to “AI” or “LLMs” (large language models) in worker reviews, the number of mentions has exploded year over year, rising by 240 percent from May 2025 to May 2026 alone.

Though 81 percent of reviews mentioning AI were positive in 2019, attitudes have swiftly reversed to just 43 percent in 2026. Negative sentiment also seems to be rising fast as well, from 41 percent in 2025 to 53 percent earlier this year.

Sorting it out by job type, Glassdoor’s economic research team found some surprising haters rising to the top. Some are to be expected, like writers, editors, and journalists, whose reviews mentioning AI were critical of the tech 81 percent of the time. Other jobs less exposed to the ravages of AI stood out, like accountants, whose reviews mentioning AI were negative 80 percent of the time. Far and away the biggest detractors, interestingly, were insurance claims adjustors, who were critical of AI in a whopping 98 percent of comments.

While it’s clear that professional workers hate AI tools, specific complaints were all over the map.

Per Glassdoor, 20 percent of negative comments around AI between 2025 and 2026 mentioned their bosses using AI as a “job killer,” while 14 percent complained that their workplaces are “AI pushers,” forcing workers to use the tech whether they want to or not. A further 13 percent said AI at their workplace was “distracting” from the main business, and 10 percent indicated that management is using AI to “alienate” workers through things like heightened workplace surveillance.

“It’s not just about the fear being replaced by AI,” the Glassdoor research team wrote. “Workers resent the push to incorporate AI into products, to use tools internally, and when employers use AI to monitor or communicate with them.”

All in all, opinions around the buzzy tech seem sharper than ever — even if everybody has their own unique reason to be an AI hater.

More on AI in the workplace: 90 Percent of Execs Say Oops, AI Didn’t Help Productivity, So Layoffs Will Continue

The post Employees Absolutely Loath AI in the Workplace, Survey Finds appeared first on Futurism.

There was a time in the United States when the richest moguls, regardless of their many personal shortcomings, embraced philanthropy in a cynical effort to keep the angry mobs at bay. Andrew Carnegie famously built libraries, John D Rockefeller helped fund research that eventually eradicated hookworm, while JP Morgan donated vast collections of art and books to museums and other cultural institutions.

Today’s robber barons aren’t in such a giving mood. Sure, there are some figures like Microsoft’s Bill Gates — who has plenty of his own problems, to be clear — but they seem to be quickly becoming the minority.

Case in point, the billionaire CEO of cyrpto-trading company Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, recently went on a tirade about how charity is actually a “net negative on the world.”

“The common view is that philanthropy is a noble cause,” Amstrong said during a recent appearance on the right-wing Katie Miller Podcast. “And like, Bill Gates after the DoJ thing is like, ‘I’m going to go rehabilitate my image, I’m going to do philanthropy.'”

That’s a fool’s errand to Armstrong, however, as such philanthropic aspirations — selfish as they are — can become “captured by ideology.”

“I guess I have sort of a contrarian view where a lot of charities and philanthropies are actually net negative on the world,” Armstrong continued. “And they get captured. It’s actually remarkably hard to find a foundation that has not gotten captured by ideology.”

Though Amstrong’s estimated net worth of around $8.7 billion puts him in the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent, he says that “so far, I’ve just been like ‘I’m not going to do that.’“

More on tech billionaires: AI Billionaires Are So Greedy That They’re Supercharging Sales of Yachts and Private Jets

The post Billionaire Coinbase CEO Boasts That He Would Never Donate to Charity appeared first on Futurism.

Renewable energy investment held steady in early 2026, as record spending on co-located solar and storage offset declines in standalone projects.

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The Road to Macstock takes a serious turn as Mike T. Rose previews his workshop on becoming a digital caretaker for family members and loved ones. Mike discusses scams targeting older adults, password sharing, remote support, Apple Passwords, financial preparedness, and the need to balance protection, respect, independence, and trust when helping others manage their digital lives. 

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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.

More on data centers: Google Data Center Announces Plans to Pave Over Protected Wetlands

The post Protests Against Data Centers Are Now Threatening $130 Billion of Big Tech’s Crucial Investments 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.

In terms of demoralizing the federal workforce and demolishing the public sector, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was a success.

In terms of actually saving money, though — its ostensible raison d’être — it was a dismal failure.

Musk vowed to slash $2 trillion in government “waste and fraud.” Then he lowered that target to $1 trillion, and behind the scenes reportedly promised Trump to save just a tenth of that figure. In the end, DOGE boasted on its website’s “Wall of Receipts” that it had saved around $215 billion — peanuts compared to its original promise.

But the actual amount of spending it slashed may be even lower than that. In a sweeping audit, the Government Accountability Office looked through the $110 billion that DOGE claimed it saved between January and July 2025, and found a trail of staggering incompetency that let loads of supposedly saved money fall through the cracks. That framing, though, could be too generous to Musk and his pimple-faced lackeys. You could also take the view that DOGE, in all likelihood, was deliberately cooking the books.

Per the GAO’s new report, released this month, DOGE claimed it terminated 13,476 contracts, but nearly 2,000 of them weren’t actually terminated. Spending-wise, about $27.4 billion of the purported savings came from these contracts that DOGE botched the terminations of.

The clumsy — or deceptive — bookkeeping didn’t end there. The receipts “includes leases identified for termination before [the group] was established,” the report states, as quoted by The Washington Post. And 108 of 264 of the leases it claimed it nixed “were already in process for termination.”

In all, the GAO found that over half of DOGE’s claimed $61 billion in contract savings couldn’t be verified or came from contracts that weren’t actually terminated. Similarly, 96 percent of the savings that it claimed came from grants couldn’t be verified by the accountability office, either.

Last August, an investigation by Politico found that of the $52.8 billion that DOGE had claimed to save by cancelling contracts at the time, its actual savings were closer to just $1.4 billion. To calculate how it saved money, DOGE dubiously used the maximum spending limit listed on the contracts it axed, figures that in practice are much higher than what the government ends up spending.

At the time, government procurement expert Jessica Tillipman told the outlet that the practice was akin to “taking out a credit card with a $20,000 credit limit, cancelling it and then saying, ‘I’ve just saved $20,000.'”

More on Elon Musk: Columbia Economist Baffled as to Why the Masses Aren’t Rising Up Against Elon Musk

The post Elon Musk’s Efforts to Cut Spending in the Government Were So Incompetent That It’s Shocking, Internal Analysis Finds appeared first on Futurism.

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.”

More on startups: We Are Mildly Horrified by This AI Startup That Coerced People Into Getting Tattoos of Its Logo in Exchange for a Job Interview

The post VC-Funded Startups Linked to Persistent Fraud appeared first on Futurism.

Few things are as mortifying to a youngster than their parents trying to butt in on their behalf: a dad berating the coach for not playing his kid more, for instance, or a mom showing up unannounced to their dorm and embarrassing them in front of your roommates.

So-called “helicopter” parents have always existed, but they’re now sticking their nose into their kid’s professional lives in ways that sound vaguely ludicrous.

At least, that’s according to bosses and recruiters that the Wall Street Journal spoke to, who complain that their Gen Z new hires are coming with the hefty baggage of overbearing parents.

These not-so-genial genitors are hounding hiring managers, shadowing their kid’s Zoom calls off-camera, and even applying for jobs on their behalf, per the paper’s reporting, leaving their employers flabbergasted. One said that some parents are even calling in sick for their adult children.

Steven Clark, CEO of an Alaska-based staffing firm, said he’s gotten calls from parents demanding to know why their child didn’t get a job.

“The first time it happened, I was appalled,” he told the WSJ. “Since then it’s become more of a here-we-go-again reaction.”

When he fired a 24-year-old who kept showing up late on his first week at a construction job, the kid’s mother called to confront him.

“I said, ‘Look, you know, this is between us and your son. He’s the employee,'” Clark recalled.

Per the reporting, Clark’s experience has become such a recurring phenomenon that it was discussed at the human resources group SHRM’s conference, the largest HR group in the world, earlier this summer. More than half of the 250 professionals in the room raised their hands when asked if a parent had called them on behalf of a young employee or job candidate, per the WSJ.

Jasmine Escalera, head career coach at the résumé service Zety, called the phenomenon “co-piloting.” In a recent survey of 1,000 Gen Zers, the company found that a mind-boggling 20 percent had a parent come with them to a job interview.

Again, helicopter parents aren’t new, and there’s a risk that this gets turned into even more Gen Z bashing. But maybe in an age when smartphones keep them in constant contact with their children, helicopter parents have become more extreme and emboldened. (Just ask the teachers who had to deal with parents freaking out when their kid’s phones were taken away.) And maybe some Gen Zers are undersocialized and under-prepared after their education was disrupted by a global pandemic. There’s also the small matter of their corhort entering what’s one of the worst job markets in decades. Anxieties are high for young jobseekers and their parents alike.

This all may be true, but sometimes moms and dads just need to let their baby birds leave the nest.

“Parents should not be calling employers to check on their application status or ask questions on behalf of their child,” Lynne Alba, a director of talent acquisition and physician recruitment at a large health system on Long Island, told the WSJ.

More on generational trends: Gen Z Appears to Be Reversing No-Drinking Trend, Now Lurching Toward Alcoholism

The post Gen Z Helicopter Parents Are So Intense That They’re Calling Hiring Managers to Interfere appeared first on Futurism.

Google’s notorious AI Overview just handed would-be Flock vandals a perfect excuse to carve into the company’s controversial AI-integrated license plate readers (ALPRs).

ALRPs are wildly unpopular, especially online, where privacy-minded communities trade memes and videos cheering on destruction of the surveillance equipment. One of the more popular bits in this space centers on the idea that Flock’s ALPR’s are supposedly packed with valuable metals like gold, copper, and zinc — so, the tongue-in-cheek riffing goes, why not crack one open and cash in at the nearest scrapyard?

Clever or not, the meme hinges on a spurious claim. ALPRs do contain trace amounts of gold and other metals, just not enough to be worth the trouble. Unless you’re well versed in breaking down circuit boards, you’d be hard pressed to earn enough to buy a Big Mac, let alone recoup your labor costs.

Google, itself an exemplar of AI-enabled surveillance, apparently missed the joke.

Search “how much gold does a Flock camera have” and Google’s AI Overview doesn’t even push back a little bit. Instead, it flatly asserts that a “Flock safety camera contains about 1 to 5 grams of gold used in its internal circuit boards and wiring.” (At today’s gold prices, that would mean each Flock camera contained up to $650 of gold.)

Google goes on to claim that Flock’s ALPRs hold anywhere from two to 23 pounds of copper, which would be an engineering marvel considering the whole device only weighs three pounds.

Google’s AI Overview cites two sources to back up its summary, and neither holds up.

The first is an anonymous Substack post from an account called do.not.obey.do.not.comply, claiming the “rough scrap value of these metals per camera is estimated to be $150 to $500.” Google’s summary skips the fine print, however: that figure comes from “estimates based on scrap-value discussions” — vibes, in other words, as opposed to actual reporting or financial information.

The second is an AI-generated Instagram post riffing on the same meme, egging vandals on to gut the camera to access their supposedly precious innards. The account behind that post seems to belong to a weed grower, with most other posts about plant cloning, hydroponics, and fully grown cannabis flower.

There’s a real irony buried in all this AI slop: one AI-surveillance company’s search engine is quietly manufacturing an excuse to destroy another AI-surveillance company’s product. If that doesn’t sum up the current state of the AI-obsessed tech industry, nothing will.

Google didn’t respond to a request for comment.

More on Flock: Flock Employee Quits In Disgust, Saying the Company Is Silencing Protestors

The post Google’s AI Is Telling Users That Flock Cameras Are Filled With Valuable Gold and Copper appeared first on Futurism.

When you’re a scientist relying on government funding to conduct your research, and that government suddenly yoinks all your money in the name of “efficiency,” you have to get creative to keep the lights on.

Such has been the experience of Daniel Blumstein, a biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, renowned for his work on studying the ground-dwelling rodents known as marmots. After the Trump administration cancelled billions of dollars in federal research grants last year, he and his colleagues decided to start creating content dedicated to the charming mammals — on OnlyFans.

As SFGate reports, their account, called “OnlyMarms,” promises near-daily “unfiltered yellow-bellied marmot content from the Rockies.” Subscribing is free, but users can leave tips on the cute photos and videos they post, which goes towards funding the research. 

It’s a win for everyone: shy gooners have a convenient explanation for all the OnlyFans transactions in their bank accounts, and the scientists get to keep doing the work they’re doing. Thank you, marmots, for being so adorable.

“Sometimes I’m just posting the videos I think will get the most ‘aws,'” Emily Renkey, a student in Blumstein’s lab who started the account, told SFGate. “But my favorite is when I find footage of a particular behavior and I can use that to educate people.”

The Trump administration’s cost-cutting regime has crippled scientific research in the US. In efforts led by Elon Musk’s now defunct Department of Government Efficiency, it cancelled more than 1,700 grants worth some $1.4 billion at the National Science Foundation in 2025. In 2026, the NSF has so far awarded just a fraction of the $9 billion grant money it has typically distributed in recent years, and the White House has proposed slashing its budget by nearly half for the 2027 fiscal year. 

Many of the grant cancellations were clearly politically motivated, targeting research into climate change — and even research that simply contains the word “climate” — something Trump has called a “hoax.” Even more flagrantly, the administration recently admitted in court documents that it canceled research grants in certain states “based solely” on whether they supported Trump in the 2024 election.

Why marmot research ended up in the administration’s crosshairs is anyone’s guess, but it’s invaluable work. Blumstein and his colleagues have spent years closely tracking the charming rodents, forming what is one of the longest-running studies of free-living mammals in the world, according to SFGate.

These long-term projects ask “some of the most important questions in our time,” Blumstein said, providing our best window into studying evolution in real-time. But their value may not be immediately obvious to the people in charge of crunching the numbers. Historically, this hasn’t been a problem for Blumstein, as his program had received funding from the NSF for over a decade. But now, under the new regime, he’s applied to renew the grant three times, before the agency told him to stop applying at all.

“After the third time, our program officer told my colleague… that they will never fund us because they think we have too much data,” Blumstein told SFGate. “I don’t even know how to parse that sentence. It’s nuts.”

Blumstein’s marmot program, as it stands, is running on fumes. OnlyMarms has only brought in a few hundred dollars, and the lab is looking for more traditional sources of funding, too.

More on science funding: Trump Orders Construction of Powerful Quantum Computer

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As unpopular as SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has become in the popular eye, some say the vitriol doesn’t go nearly far enough.

In an episode of his podcast Ones and Tooze, Columbia University economic historian Adam Tooze picked apart the increasingly expensive AI arms race and its consequences for humanity. Among Tooze’s observations: the AI boom is completely upending the long-standing social contract under capitalism, a shift embodied most dramatically by Musk.

During the podcast, co-host Cameron Abadi asked what a “best case scenario” for AI might look like — where a human-level superintelligence emerges that can automate the world’s jobs. In response, Tooze pointed to a report from the Bank of International Settlements: under that scenario, labor’s share of income could collapse from an already paltry 54 percent to just 20 percent, meaning workers would be forced to fight over the remaining crumbs that drop from billionaires’ tables.

“The share in the total pie collapses, and that’s obviously a huge transformation in political power,” Tooze explained. And though that’s a future projection, the economic historian notes we’re already seeing symptoms of this extreme reversal of fortunes today, chiefly in the extreme wealth accumulation of Musk.

“I don’t understand frankly why the event of Musk’s enrichment isn’t more of a scandal, isn’t more a historic moment,” Tooze said. “Like this — to have a trillionaire in our midst ruptures the social bargain in such a — just such a dramatic way, like how can we even be any longer talking about being in the same society as this group of individuals who’ve unleashed this technology on the world.”

“It goes beyond Luddism,” Tooze continued, referring to the 19th-century labor movement that saw workers smash textile looms to fight back against economic exploitation. “It’s not about resisting the technology per se, it’s about asking ‘which social contract this belongs to?'”

Though it remains to be seen how severe an impact AI actually has on the labor market, one scenario keeps surfacing: superintelligent AI fuels a drastic rise in economic inequality, with tech billionaires on one end, and the working class on the other.

Comparing the current “AI arms race” to the actual nuclear arms race, Tooze asks the listener to imagine a “private Manhattan Project, developing a thermonuclear weapon,” calling superintelligent AI “kind of like a labor-market neutron bomb.”

And where the Manhattan Project was funded, organized, and staffed by the US government, the current AI boom takes almost the exact opposite approach, following the whims of the ultra-rich.

“Clearly, government money has gone into Silicon Valley in various ways,” Tooze caveats. “But nevertheless, the contrast between the Manhattan Project… and the realities of the current moment, spearheaded by a figure like Elon Musk, who literally has eviscerated the state apparatus of that first [nuclear] race… it strikes me that it’s really a regression away from the mid-century arms race model to something that’s much more like the ‘Merchants of Death’ vision.” (The Merchants of Death was a moniker for 1930s-era war profiteers.)

“We’re back in that space” Tooze continues, “of private, unfettered, oligarchic — but global — arms race… to my mind, the [AI arms race] analogy is interesting not because of the similarities, but because of the differences it reveals.”

More on Musk: Suddenly, as His Empire Crumbles, Elon Musk Admits He Made a Huge Mistake With DOGE

The post Columbia Economist Baffled as to Why the Masses Aren’t Rising Up Against Elon Musk appeared first on Futurism.

Suddenly, things ain’t looking great for the AI industry. Or at least for the people pouring loads of money into it.

Situational Awareness, a much-hyped AI hedge-fund whose 24-year-old founder Leopold Aschenbrenner preached endless AI gains, basically imploded over this month amid a mass tech sell-off. 

The Wall Street Journal reported that it’s now down 67 percent in July, forcing Aschenbrenner to desperately seek clients to buy its shares on the cheap to cover its losses.

“We let you down this month,” the fund wrote in a letter to clients, per the WSJ.

Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI researcher who had zero investment experience before launching the fund, has been hailed as the “Nostradamus of AI.” He apparently didn’t predict his rapid reversal of fortunes, though.

The Financial Times reported that his fund returned 439 percent for the year through June, and was up 1,551 percent since its founding. 

Then came July. According to CNBC, the fund assets reached a peak of $45 billion, before beginning a precipitous decline this month. Pretty much everything went against its way. Its commitments to AI infrastructure tanked when the likes of the semiconductor manufacturer SK Hynix dropped off a cliff. And it shorted software companies — which investors once feared would be outmoded by AI labs — like Adobe, which instead continued to steadily climb. 

Other companies it invested in, including Sandisk, Micron, and CoreWave, are all down more than 35 percent this month, CNBC noted.

As the dominoes fell, Aschenbrenner sent a letter to investors to quell their fears, highlighting how well it had performed until this point. Boldly, he also said that the mass tech sell off was a “particularly good time to add funds,” the FT reported.

But when the assets kept tanking — and more money didn’t come in —  Aschenbrenner started frantically calling investors trying to get them to sell assets or pour in fresh capital, according to the reporting. When it got even worse, his clients couldn’t reach him.

“Leopold just stopped taking calls,” one investor told the FT.

With nowhere to turn to, Situational Awareness sold the majority of its public assets to the investment firm Citadel, though it hung onto its stake in Anthropic. The FT reported that Citadel’s vulturous purchase of Situational Awareness’s shares “marks one of the largest and most sudden stock transactions in Wall Street history.”

Situational Awareness, despite commanding billions in assets, operated with a skeleton staff of only four investment professionals and eight employees overall, the FT found in a regulatory filing. The fund used borrowed money to buy shares, which helped boost its returns, but made its losses far worse when those assets declined.

AI stocks will likely weather this storm. The real warning sign is that investors are so blinded by AI that they’re entrusting their billions to someone who had no idea what they were doing.

More on AI: Microsoft CEO Warns That Companies Embracing AI Could Drive Themselves Out of Business

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