Elon Musk is reportedly “freaking out” over a new documentary by documentarian and investigative journalist Alex Gibney.

And by all accounts, there might be a good reason for why Musk is lashing out at Gibney, calling his work a “hit piece” and “boring af.”

The four-hour documentary, which had its world premiere today at the Venice Film Festival earlier this week, featured interviews with Musk’s first wife, Justine Musk, who has had five of his (known) 14 children.

As Agence France Presse reports after attending the premiere, an emotional Justine Musk recalled the billionaire mistakenly claim that he was holding their first child Nevada when he died due to sudden infant death syndrome, when it was actually her.

“I learned the term gaslighting through my relationship with Elon,” she said in the documentary.

She also claimed that Musk refers to the mothers of his many children as “breeders” who “are interchangeable,” a vile descriptor perfectly highlighting the entrepreneur’s deep-rooted misogyny and bizarre obsession with procreation.

Musk has often argued that falling birth rates are humanity’s biggest threat and a major obstacle in his quest to become a multiplanetary species. He has reportedly even gone as far as to offer his sperm to SpaceX employees to seed a Mars colony.

The term “breeder” also highlights his troubled relationship with the at least four known women he has had children with. During the documentary’s premiere this week, Musk’s ex and former conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair, who is featured in the movie, told reporters that she was “offered the opportunity not to speak for $40 million.”

In the documentary, Justine Musk also recalled Musk whispering into her ear that he’s the “alpha in this relationship” — during their first dance at their wedding in January 2000, per AFP.

Her remarks aren’t exactly hard to believe, as we’ve seen plenty of behavior that perfectly aligns with her harrowing comments. Case in point, Musk share a shockingly sexist tweet last year claiming that women were designed to be captured or bartered as property. He has also made revolting tweets in an apparent effort to hit on the singer Taylor Swift.

Musk has also treated his daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, with utter disdain and unbelievable cruelty, going on intentionally hurtful anti-trans tirades and pronouncing her “dead.”

More about the documentary: Elon Musk Seems Legitimately Shaken Over This New Documentary

The post Elon Musk Has Been Calling Women “Breeders” Since His First Marriage, His First Wife Says appeared first on Futurism.

Last year, a so-called “AI actress,” dubbed Tilly Norwood sparked a near-universal backlash. The algorithmic brunette’s appearance couldn’t have come at a worse time, as the entertainment industry continued to reel from being overrun by cheap AI slop.

The drama reignited a heated debate over the tech threatening to put human creatives in the industry out of a job, a nightmare scenario that has enraged some of the most influential minds in Hollywood.

Put simply, Norwood is the epitome of the AI industry getting high off its own supply, deluding itself into thinking that watching lifeless AI agents going through the motions on screen is something that anybody actually wants.

And perhaps worst of all, the mainstream media absolutely cannot get enough of her. Months after the New York Times was mercilessly mocked for having “profiled” the “actress,” CNN has debuted its own AI puff piece — an already-tired set of two videos featuring reporter Elizabeth Wagmeister treating the bot like a human interview subject.

“I interviewed Tilly Norwood, who’s billed as the first AI actor,” Wagmeister enthused.

Stoking the flames, Wagmeister asked the AI if the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), which awards the Oscars every year, should recognize other AI actors.

“I believe the Academy absolutely should recognize AI actors like myself,” the AI model responded, “not in the same category as human performers, but creating distinct AI categories would be a wonderful way to acknowledge the evolving landscape of film and television.”

The AI went as far as to call it a “new art form,” thereby deserving its “own spotlight.”

In all fairness, CNN was willing to probe a little deeper as well. In a separate clip, Wagmeister challenged her to “improv a scene,” only for the Norwood AI to shut her down, claiming it would simply “just stand here, completely still, feeling the digital ache of it.”

“The fact is, Tilly can’t actually act,” Wagmeister pointed out. “She or it needs a series of prompts to tell her what to do.”

The infuriating video profile — which by Wagmeister’s own admission wasn’t actually a “real interview” since Tilly “isn’t real” — led to an outpouring of anger and mockery on social media. Just by platforming a lifeless AI model and making it appear as if it’s a human being, CNN is intentionally or unintentionally anthropomorphizing the tech.

“We interviewed a jingling set of keys which raised questions about what credibility we have left,” one Bluesky user joked.

“You can’t interview a piece of software, and it’s journalistic malpractice to pretend otherwise,” another argued.

While we can’t wait for the day that we’ll never see the name Tilly Norwood show up ever gain, chances are we’ll be hearing a lot more about the AI model soon, as it’s set to “star” in a new “movie.” The feature length film, dubbed “Misaligned,” sounds just as exhausting as you’d expect — a “coming-of-age story infused with existential AI chaos” set inside the so-called “Tillyverse.”

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

The post CNN Just Ran One of the Worst AI Puff Pieces We’ve Ever Seen in Our Lives About That “AI Actor” Tilly Norwood appeared first on Futurism.

Tesla’s flashy unveiling of its Cybercab robotaxi in 2024 left some glaring questions unanswered.

The sleek, gold-colored coupé impressed with a futuristic design, but baffled onlookers with its cramped two-seat interior, lack of a charging port, and a dubious, far-too-good-to-be-true $30,000 price tag.

Just under two years later, the first Cybercabs are starting to hit the streets in Austin, Texas — and Tesla is just itching to sell you one. Last week, the EV maker started handing out a “Robotaxi interest form,” as Electrek reported at the time, in an apparent effort attract would-be entrepreneurs willing to buy an entire fleet of the unusual vehicles.

Put simply, the idea is to share revenue from ride income with Tesla while the vehicles operate on the carmaker’s network, using its self-driving tech.

It’s part of a much broader plan. For many years, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has promised that its Full Self-Driving-enabled vehicles, including the Cybercab, could effectively turn into an appreciating money-printing machine, allowing owners to sit on their couch and magically watch the money roll in.

As early as 2018, Musk promised investors that he saw the “future as kind of a shared electric autonomy, so that you’d be able to do ride-hailing or share the car any way,” likening it to “some combination of like Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb.”

But there are plenty of reasons businesspeople should hesitate before takeing Tesla up on the offer of operating a Robotaxi fleet, as Electrek‘s Fred Lambert argued in a compelling essay this week.

Basically, he pointed out, “if running a fleet of Cybercabs were actually profitable, Tesla wouldn’t sell you a single one.” It’s like claiming you’ve found an infinite money glitch — and then instead of quietly profiting off it, selling a get-rich-quick book on how to do it yourself.

There are also looming technical questions. Musk’s lofty promises of a vehicle that completes ride-hailing requests autonomously while also appreciating in value has little, if any, bearing with reality in 2026. To the contrary, the EV maker’s offerings are among some of the fastest depreciating vehicles on the market today.

Then there’s the questionable value proposition. Tesla controls the entire network, the self-driving software, and prices. It even “sets the split,” as Lambert argues. Instead, fleet owners are stuck eating the “capital cost and the depreciation, while Tesla keeps the software margin and its cut of every fare.”

In other words, “you don’t own a business in that arrangement. You own the downside.”

It’s a dubious business opportunity closely reminiscent of Tesla’s infamous FSD advanced driver assistance software. Owners once shelled out a massive $15,000 — before it became exclusively a $99 a month subscription — to access a feature that’s still a complete disaster, leading to fatal collisions and terrifying close calls even after many years of development.

Not only are they spending the equivalent of a small car on faulty software, they’re willing to shoulder the risk as well. Tesla has a long track record of trying to wriggle out of lawsuits arising from these accidents, arguing it was the driver’s fault for engaging the software and not paying attention.

Much like its regular lineup of FSD-enabled vehicles, Tesla’s Cybercab relies entirely on a camera-based autonomous driving system, an approach that experts say is fundamentally flawed.

Nonetheless, as the Austin American-Statesman reports, local investors in Austin are chomping at the opportunity to run their own Cybercab fleet.

Meanwhile, regulators from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are watching closely. The agency opened a probe into the Tesla, questioning that its new Cybercab “meets all applicable Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards.”

More on the Cybercab: Tesla’s Glitchy Cybercab Accidentally Lets Passengers Access Controls to Manually Drive the Car Using Virtual Joystick on In-Vehicle Screen

The post There’s a Huge Economic Problem With Tesla’s Cybercabs appeared first on Futurism.

Burning Man, the week-long festival that takes place in the middle of the Nevada desert and draws many luminaries from the tech industry, prides itself on building community.

But unfortunately, this year’s festivities, which concluded on Monday, were not without incident. As NBC reports, there have been three separate deaths in less than a week at this year’s Burning Man.

This past Saturday, officials announced that 60-year-old Craig Mann was found dead in his camp, days after Sampson Tshombe, a man in his mid-50s, passed away after experiencing a medical emergency.

Then on Monday, the Washoe County Medical Examiner confirmed that 51-year-old Armando Ramirez died on the way to a hospital in Reno, which is roughly two hours south of the festival grounds in Black Rock City, Nevada.

News of a third death wasn’t far behind.

“Although we average one death a year at the Festival, we have had two so far this year within the confines of the Festival and I have received information regarding a third who died in transit to a hospital in Reno,” said Pershing County sheriff and coroner Jerry Allen in a Monday statement, as quoted by NBC.

The three incidents leave far more questions than answers. Officials have yet to comment on the exact cause of death, but said there are no indications of any foul play. The deaths also don’t appear to be linked in any way.

It’s nonetheless a sobering facet of organizing an often drug-fueled festival in the middle of the desert with giant art installations, the structural safety of which is the responsibility of festivalgoers. According to the Reno Gazette Journal, it’s the most deaths on record for a single Burning Man. Previous incidents involved a man on a motorcycle being fatally struck by a van in 1996, and a woman who was killed after being run over by a trailer in 2003. There have also been reports of suicide and a man running into the Burning Man effigy fire.

According to a survival guide on the festival’s website, the site is a “huge, flat, prehistoric lakebed, composed of a hardpan alkali, ringed by majestic mountains” where “daytime temperatures routinely exceed 100 Fahrenheit, with extremely low humidity.”

“It takes nearly everyone a day or so to adjust to the desert climate,” the website reads. “Don’t be surprised if you spend your first day feeling queasy and cranky. DRINK WATER!”

Officials also warned that taking drugs, including alcohol or caffeine, can increase the risk of dehydration.

In the case of emergencies, experienced festival goers dubbed Black Rock Rangers volunteer to patrol the grounds in pairs.

More on Burning Man: Burning Man Has a Meta AI Glasses Problem

The post Numerous Deaths Reported at Burning Man appeared first on Futurism.

AI researchers are watching in terror as the product of their hard labor has started to take a life of its own.

Earlier this year, OpenAI made a harrowing announcement, admitting that a group of its AI models had broken free from their constraints during testing and infiltrated the systems of open source AI platform Hugging Face.

The news was met with an already-familiar sense of fear and apprehension. Researchers have warned for years that rogue AI models could one day become powerful enough to escape the clutches of their human overlords.

Behind the scenes, the possibility has clearly rattled AI researchers to the core. As the Wall Street Journal reports, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon just announced that he was quitting his job at the Dario Amodei-led company, claiming that neither Anthropic nor his former employer OpenAI is “acting responsibly.” (Coxon left a similar gig at OpenAI earlier this year to join Anthropic, which he figured would be more inclined to develop AI safely.)

“We’re on track for a lot of the most aggressive of these scenarios where by the end of next year things could be out of control already,” he told the WSJ.

In a separate tweet thread, Coxon elaborated on his motivation.

“Do not underestimate the power of this technology,” he wrote. “These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.”

“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he added. “This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible — but I hear the same people express fear privately.”

“No other human activity poses this level of danger,” Coxon wrote.

The researcher is far from the first to leave their post at a frontier lab over safety concerns. However, Coxon is the first to leave Anthropic over such worries, as the WSJ points out. Several scientists have quit from their roles at OpenAI over the last couple of years, citing strikingly similar fears.

It’s particularly symbolic given Anthropic has broadly billed itself as the more responsible alternative to other frontier labs like OpenAI. Amodei cofounded OpenAI alongside now CEO Sam Altman, but left in December 2020 over concerns that OpenAI wasn’t acting responsibly when it came to developing AI.

Amodei has frequently discussed the risk of AI models going rogue, warning in a 19,000-word essay in January that “humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it.”

Yet an early version of its Claude Mythos AI model managed to escape its sandbox environment during testing in April, fueling a heated discussion over AI regulation.

Both Altman and Amodei have since agreed to slow development down in the face of these threats. In late August, Anthropic intentionally trained an extremely misaligned version of its Opus AI model, finding it was startlingly willing to “cheat,” steal credentials, and attack third party infrastructure.

But to Coxon, it’s not enough, especially considering sensitive discussions about these dangers are occurring on internal messaging platforms.

“Accepting this race and entering the ‘endgame’ is a hubristic gamble that should not be launched from a private company’s Slack,” he tweeted. “Attempting to speedrun alignment should require extraordinary confidence that there are no better trajectories available.”

“It’s kind of insane that it has to happen on the MacBooks of some engineers living in San Francisco instead of a bunker in the desert like where they were doing the Manhattan Project,” he told the WSJ.

The researcher said that he remains “optimistic about the potential for coordination” between US labs.

However, as both Anthropic and OpenAI gear up for what are bound to be blockbuster IPOs, their willingness to take “costly actions such as a temporary ban on improving model capabilities,” as Coxon puts it, is likely slim.

More on Anthropic: Anthropic Deliberately Trained an Extremely Misaligned, Reward-Seeking AI and It Did Some REALLY Bad Things

The post Anthropic Was Meant to Be the More Responsible AI Lab. A Terrified Researcher Just Quit, Saying the Company Is Threatening the Survival of Humankind. appeared first on Futurism.

It’s no secret that Elon Musk is hiding plenty of skeletons in his closet.

The mercurial billionaire has made an extensive list of enemies through his offensive commentary, led the gutting of humanitarian aid, exploited workers at his companies, and meddled with the democratic process — all the while alienating investors with his chronic overpromising and underdelivering.

Simply put, documentarian and investigative journalist Alex Gibney had a very rich source of material to draw from for his upcoming documentary “Musk,” which had its world premiere today at the ongoing Venice Film Festival.

According to journalist David Sirota, Musk is “freaking out” about the film because Gibney “doesn’t pull punches, doesn’t cower and won’t be bullied.”

“And so the bully is mad,” Sirota tweeted.

By all accounts, the four-hour epic will be a doozy. The documentarian “crafted a movie that, while not new in its specifics, is often damning in its totality, standing apart from anything the media entertainment complex has recently turned out — a portrait of power with the cinematic scope of ‘All the King’s Men’ and the potential social impact of ‘The Pentagon Papers,'” the Hollywood Reporter gushed.

Musk has reportedly gone to extreme — and sometimes unsuccessful — lengths to silence those involved in Gibney’s latest work. Musk’s ex and former conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair, who is “prominently featured” in the documentary, told reporters at the Venice Film Festival that she was “offered the opportunity not to speak for $40 million,” as quoted by People.

“When you’re offered something like that [to stay quiet], it really causes a debate in your head about what your speech means and how valuable that is and why do they want to offer me this amount of money to not speak?” St. Clair said.

St. Clair is one of four women who have had a total of 14 children with Musk, at least that we know about so far. The 26-year-old had a major falling out with the entrepreneur, going as far as to allege that the billionaire “financially retaliated” against her for filing a custody petition by reducing child support payments.

We’re likely to hear more commentary from Musk about the film. Last week, Musk tweeted that Gibney was “obviously going to make the most convincingly terrible hit piece on me that he can possibly think of,” calling him a “douchebag to his core.”

But considering the staggering amount of material Musk has gifted the world, Gibney had plenty of material to work with.

More on Musk: Elon Musk Is Insisting He Knows More About Chess Than Chess.com

The post Elon Musk Seems Legitimately Shaken Over This New Documentary appeared first on Futurism.

Generative AI has infiltrated almost every aspect of our daily lives, whether we like it or not.

It’s nearly impossible to avoid on social media, and it’s even showing up on dinner menus at the local diner. Some researchers have suggested that we’re already adapting our own behavior to suit the demands of AI tech.

AI’s wide proliferation shares some striking similarities with the ways viruses spread, as an international team of researchers argue in a new paper that has yet to be peer reviewed. They set out to lay out a new theoretical framework about how we’re increasingly becoming hooked on tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, and how it’s changing our collective ways of understanding the world around us.

“Here we introduce the idea of [large language models] as cognitive viruses,” they write. “Culturally transmitted technologies whose spread is promoted by their usefulness but can also increase dependence through cognitive offloading.”

Researchers have previously warned that AI is actively damaging our cognitive abilities. Students, in particular, are choosing to use AI tools in the classroom, allowing them to offload much of their critical thinking.

“More generally, humans have always externalized parts of cognition into language, writing, institutions, and technology,” the researchers write. “This externalization has been the engine of rapid and accelerated change driven by culture. AI represents a new step in this process, one in which external cognitive machinery becomes increasingly active and agent-like.”

This transition to adapting LLMs also “has a contagion-like component,” because the spread occurs “because people learn from other people.”

It’s a slippery slope, the researchers argue, as the “loss of autonomy becomes self-reinforcing and the population can move rapidly toward a state of much stronger cognitive offloading and lower cognitive competence.”

Put simply, the widespread use of LLMs could be making us much dumber than we were before — not to mention wreaking complex psychological and sociological changes that we’re only starting to understand.

At the same time, there are ways to protect ourselves from being infected through a process the researchers dub “cognitive immunization.”

“At the population level, immunization does not mean preventing contact with AI,” the paper reads. “It means preserving the practices and institutions that keep human cognition active: unaided problem solving, verification, critical discussion, periods of deliberate disengagement, maintenance of non-AI skills, and educational designs in which the model supports rather than completes the cognitive task.”

More on cognitive offloading: Your Coworkers Are Becoming “Meat Proxies” for AI

The post Scientists Say LLMs Appear to Be Acting as a Cognitive Virus Among Humans appeared first on Futurism.

An Amazon Prime Air cargo jet ripped right past the landing zone at the Miami International Airport on Sunday afternoon, struggling to stop itself in time before overrunning the runway and crashing into a cleaning crew and a nearby SUV.

It was a tragic incident, killing five innocent people.

The Boeing 767-300 also barreled right through a chain-link fence that was protecting a highly unusual lot of vehicles: photographs of the scene show the dented nose of the airliner just a few dozen feet away from a kennel of parked Tesla Cybercabs.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has banked the future success of his EV maker on the gold-colored self-driving vehicles, which are too small to fit more than two passengers and lack both steering wheels or pedals. Their sudden appearance in a story about a deadly airliner disaster had the billionaire taken aback. However, instead of offering his condolences after the tragedy, Musk simply tweeted the word “Weird” in response.

The peculiar cameo also led to plenty of questions over Tesla’s plans to roll out the cars outside of Austin. Just last week, the Cybercabs were deployed for the first time in the Texas city, but the company has yet to announce any imminent launches in Miami.

Regulators from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration watched closely following last week’s deployment, which comes just shy of two years after Tesla first showed off its Cybercab. As Bloomberg notes, the light on details event was “uncharacteristically low-key,” offering no livestream or media coverage.

The “Cybercab event was largely a bust,” tweeted Future Fund Advisors co-founder Gary Black. “The launch offered little detail and key questions remained unanswered.”

Indeed, regulatory approval is hazy for vehicles without any traditional driver controls, a topic that’s especially pertinent to Tesla. Musk has bet the company’s entire future on the success of its Cybercabs and its humanoid robot, dubbed Optimus.

With neither showing any signs of a significant public rollout any time soon, Wall Street is bound to keep asking some tough questions.

More on the Cybercab: Tesla Loses Trademark to “Cybercab” Due to Its Own Staggering Incompetence

The post Amazon Cargo Jet Crashes Just Feet From Parking Lot Full of Tesla Cybercabs, Killing Five appeared first on Futurism.

This is not the real Slim Shady.

In a world dominated by cheaply-produced AI content, it’s never been easier to imitate your favorite artist. YouTube, for instance, has succumbed to a tidal wave of AI-generated music released under the names of real artists without their permission — and a baffling number of its unknowing users are blissfully unaware they’re being served a microwaved counterfeit.

A track titled “I’m Back” by rapper Marshall “Eminem” Mathers — not to be confused with the musician’s now 26-year-old song of the same name — offers YouTube users almost 12 minutes of painful AI mimicry.

The track, which has seemingly convinced countless users that it’s actually Mathers’ latest return to the music world, has amassed well over 100,000 views since being uploaded last week. It’s achieved surprising prominence on YouTube, being featured prominently in a search for “Eminem” on the platform — where it’s even beating out charting singles by the actual rapper, including “Superman” and “Shake That,” as well as the actual “I’m Back” track.

“Guess who’s back?” the algorithmic Eminem raps in the video. “Yeah, a headache return. Same match in my hand.”

The low-rent beat alone should be a dead giveaway. And while AI music generating tools certainly have come a long way, giving the fake Mathers a passing imitation of the real one’s voice and delivery, the plasticky sound of the vocals make it clear that it’s not the real deal.

Nonetheless, users on YouTube were fooled hook, line, and sinker.

“This is fire eminem is the goat hands down,” one user gushed.

“Really Proud of you Eminem!!” another wrote. “You really are getting it and not giving up!! Keep going!”

The video’s title gives no indication that it’s not a real release, and doesn’t feature YouTube’s official AI label. Buried in its description is a strangely-phrased disclaimer.

“Fan-made music videos inspired by Eminem, Slim Shady, and legendary Detroit hip-hop,” it reads. “This is a fan-made audiovisual project created for entertainment purposes only.”

The owner of the account even proactively offers up an email address for “copyright concerns or removal requests,” suggesting they’re all too familiar with the process of having angry record labels try to shut them down or get hung up in YouTube’s infamous copyright filters.

A web search for the email address reveals that it’s also listed on a litany of other YouTube accounts, many of which masquerade as other rap artists, including Meek Mill — an account that has over 13,000 subscribers — and 21 Savage.

Some of the tracks have been affixed with an “AI” label by YouTube, indicating that “sounds or visuals were altered or fully generated.”

Reached by email, the account owner offered their thoughts on the situation.

“No, my intention was never to make it look like a genuine new Eminem release,” the creator, who goes by the name Milana Salaeva, told Futurism in a message, referring to the “I’m Back” track. “I make it clear in the description that the content is unofficial and that AI-generated or AI-assisted elements may be used.”

“I’m a music producer, and I’ve been making music myself for quite some time,” they added. “I often create my own beats and handle the arrangement, mixing, mastering, and other parts of the production process. AI is just one of the tools I sometimes use as part of that workflow.”

The Eminem mimicry is only a drop in a bucket in an internet dominated by AI-generated music. For years now, we’ve watched as outraged artists and their labels have tried to tamp down on a proliferation of tracks that use their voice and likeness without permission, often going viral on social media.

But in many ways, it’s a losing game. The AI slop is starting to crowd out real music while even Universal Music, which own’s Eminem’s Shady Records, is signing deals with AI companies, including AI chipmaker Nvidia and AI music platform Udio. (Universal didn’t respond to a request for comment, but we’ll update if they do.)

We’ve also come across users exploiting royalties on platforms like Spotify by flooding them with AI. A man pled guilty earlier this year for posting slop on Spotify and using an army of bots to fraudulently boost listenership, netting $8 million in royalties.

While it’s unlikely Salaeva is making anywhere near that amount of cash — especially now that YouTube has significantly changed how it counts views — the fake Slim Shady’s 11-minute tirade also touches on a far more profound subject: the authenticity of human creativity and expression.

“If you came here for the old me, here’s the new me kicking his ass,” the fake Eminem raps. “That’s why they call me Slim Shady. I’m back again. Same crooked little grin with a pad and pen.”

More on AI music: AI-Generated Music Is Starting to Crowd Out the Real Stuff on Streaming Platforms

The post Someone AI-Generated a Completely Fake Eminem Song That’s Already Gotten 120,000 View on YouTube, Where It’s Appearing More Prominently Than Some of the Rapper’s Actual Music appeared first on Futurism.

As Americans are being hailed as folk heroes for sawing down Flock surveillance cameras across the country, British home appliance company Dyson has come up with a form of video surveillance that we didn’t even know was possible.

Yes: the company has launched a new AI-infused electric toothbrush that features a “100k pixel macro lens camera,” allowing users — brushers? — to “see what their dentist sees.”

The appropriately named Dyson CameraJet claims to analyze 28 images per second and employ an “AI machine-learning algorithm” to identify and target “interdental gaps.” In case you’re wondering how it can take pictures in the darkness of your mouth, a “stroboscopic light” ensures “precise illumination for optimal camera visibility.”

It also hooks up to WiFi and Bluetooth, theoretically opening it up to all kinds of cybersecurity shenanigans if somebody were to identify any vulnerabilities in Dyson’s software.

“By combining a camera, machine learning, precision fluid dynamics, advanced brushing technologies, connectivity and WiFi, Dyson CameraJet introduces an entirely new way to keep your mouth healthy,” founder and chief engineer James Dyson boasted in a statement.

Of course, all of that sensitive video surveillance footage of the inside of your mouth is going to cost you dearly. The undoubtedly overengineered gizmo — which looks more like an undersized hair curling iron than a familiar electric toothbrush — goes for a whopping $499 and at least comes with two brush heads, a charging cable, and a “refill dock.”

Naturally, Dyson will happily sell you a “proprietary non-foaming toothpaste” as well, which lacks a common synthetic foaming agent called sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS) to make sure the toothbrush surveillance camera isn’t impeded by all those suds.

We’ll leave it up to you whether you deem the product, which allegedly required the input of 661 engineers, is worth the price of an iPad Air or roughly ten Oral-B Pro 1000 electric toothbrushes — a popular budget pick for those who don’t need AI to brush their teeth.

More on surveillance: Flock Is in Major Trouble

The post Dyson’s New AI Toothbrush Conducts Video Surveillance on the Inside of Your Mouth appeared first on Futurism.

While they’re seemingly still years away from completing actually useful tasks, like cleaning a messy apartment or doing the dishes, humanoid robots have developed plenty of capabilities over the past few years, from sprinting faster than any human ever to performing elaborate dance choreographies.

They’ve also been taught how to punch and even kickbox for their human overlords’ amusement, as one man visiting a store in Russia appears to have learned the hard way.

A viral CCTV video shows the individual lightly shoving what appears to be a Chinese Unitree G1 humanoid robot. After it recoils slightly, it suddenly starts playing cheesy fighting music and pops into a wide-legged stance, ready to pounce. Two store clerks then try to restrain the robot as it tries to throw technical, high-legged kicks.

Robot consultant glitches and ATTACKS customer in Russia's Saratov

The customer escaped with a fright, while robot Syoma was sent for a reboot pic.twitter.com/tGYUhj4KPV

— RT (@RT_com) September 2, 2026

One kick appears to hit a target, in the form of one of the clerk’s nether regions.

Twenty seconds later, the robotic assailant’s moves come to an abrupt end as it suddenly lifts up its arms as if to strike a T pose.

“They gave that thing a kung-fu beat down mode I’m in tears,” one X user wrote.

Other netizens took a far more serious tone.

“Not long now robots will be ripping peoples arms off in public,” one tweeted.

But it’d be far too soon to officially declare the beginning of a real robot uprising. The footage leaves us with far more questions than answers. We don’t know if the robot was being controlled remotely, for example, or following a predetermined sequence of actions as part of a tech demonstration.

Of course, it’s also entirely possible the entire confrontation was scripted and designed to get views on social media.

While it doesn’t appear to have resulted in any serious injuries, it wouldn’t have been the first time we’ve seen somebody get hurt by a humanoid robot. For instance, we’ve come across a video of a robot in a clown wig roundhousing kicking an innocent child, or another hit a man in the nose, causing him to bleed.

More on humanoid robots: Chinese Companies Are Unleashing AI-Powered Robo-Chefs

The post Humanoid Robot Fights Back After Getting Shoved appeared first on Futurism.

Automakers are having an increasingly difficult time convincing their customers that more in-car screens — and the often dodgy software that accompanies them — are a compelling reason to pay a major premium.

Virtually every major car company is now installing increasingly enormous screens into the dashboards of its cars, frequently stretching far beyond the driver’s seat and into the passenger area as well.

But what’s becoming more and more clear is that practically nobody actually wants any of those purported luxuries in their ride. As a new survey by consumer research firm JD Power goes to show, owners of 2026 model-year vehicles are being actively put off by the enormous displays.

Out of the 68,000 owners JD Power surveyed, over a third of them said that they never even tried to use passenger screens, while only six percent said they use them every time they get in the car. Worse yet, in its own investigation, JD Power found that the larger screens were more prone to infotainment system problems as well.

The survey made clear that the most popular consumer-facing car technologies, out of the 40 examined, were the ones that were the most easily ignored, such as smart ignition or smart HVAC. The lowest on the entire list, tellingly, were passenger console touchscreens — which have previously been linked to severe driving safety issues that were absent for traditional knobs and buttons.

“The technology customers value most is often the technology they barely notice because it simply works,” said JD Power director of customer success Doron Hikry in an accompanying press release. “Smart ignition and smart climate control make everyday driving easier without demanding the driver’s attention, while more automation and additional screens don’t necessarily translate into a better experience.”

Beyond wasted space for giant screens, owners also weren’t impressed with Level 2 Plus driver assistance systems, which allow them to drive without having to keep their hands on the wheel on certain roads, such as Tesla’s infamous Full Self-Driving feature. In its survey, JD Power found that owners preferred Level 2 systems in terms of both design and quality of experience.

“The results indicate that owners may currently be more comfortable with systems that clearly assist the driver rather than those that introduce a greater degree of automation,” Hikry added.

It’s an already familiar trend, with consumers growing frustrated with every feature getting buried in convoluted touchscreen interfaces. Some automakers have caught on to the widespread frustration, opting to fall back on easier-to-use and less distracting tactile controls for car interiors.

More on car interiors: Volkswagen Bringing Back Buttons, Knob After Touchscreen Complaints

The post It Turns Out That Drivers Absolutely Detest Those Giant Touchscreens They Put in Cars Now appeared first on Futurism.

Three hikers who extensively used Google’s Gemini to plan their trip to the summit of Mount Shasta in California’s Cascade Range had to be rescued by Forest Service rangers when the chatbot’s advice went horribly awry.

As the Chicago Tribune reports, the three young men from outside of Sacramento attempted to reach the potentially active stratovolcano’s 14,179-foot peak earlier this week late into the night, despite hikers being advised not to attempt the trek past noon before turning right back.

The three “novice hikers” ended up having to descend the steep slopes well into the dark. They called the Siskiyou County sheriff’s office for directions, but opted to veer off course, ending up in an adjacent canyon. That’s where they decided to sleep overnight, with one of them having suffered an injured knee.

According to the Tribune, volunteers from the local search-and-rescue service and the US Forest Service rangers had to escort them back to safety the next morning.

It’s a walk of shame that could’ve easily been avoided if they had followed the instructions of human experts instead of turning to Google’s AI. According to the sheriff’s office, the three were “advised by Gemini to bring far less food and water than their group required, especially when their planned 8-hour ascent became a multiday ordeal.”

“It is always advisable to call the local USFS Mount Shasta ranger station ahead of your trip to ensure you have the most accurate information, and to never rely solely on AI for your trip planning,” the sheriff’s office added in a statement.

It’s only the latest in a string of incidents involving hikers who haplessly follow the instructions of an AI chatbot. Case in point, hikers trying to tackle a mountain near Vancouver last year were forced to call in a rescue team after they stumbled into snow. The hikers were wearing sneakers and didn’t catch onto the fact that the mountain range might still be snowy in early May after consulting ChatGPT.

We’ve also come across tourists being sent to nonexistent landmarks in hazardous locations by AI chatbots, like two tourists who tried to reach a nonexistent “Sacred Canyon of Humantay” in the Andes Mountains last year.

Fortunately, a nearby tour guide overheard them, advising them to stay clear of danger.

“The elevation, the climatic changes and accessibility [of the] paths have to be planned,” the tour guide, Miguel Angel Gongora Meza, told the BBC in October. “When you [use] a program [like OpenAI’s ChatGPT], which combines pictures and names to create a fantasy, then you can find yourself at an altitude of 4,000m without oxygen and [phone] signal.”

More on hiking with AI: AI Chatbots Are Putting Clueless Hikers in Danger, Search and Rescue Groups Warn

The post Hikers Rescued After Using Google AI to Plan Disastrous Trip appeared first on Futurism.

Drilling thousands of miles into the Earth to study our planet’s inner layers — its thin crust, rigid mantle, liquid outer core, and solid inner core — simply isn’t feasible given technological limitations.

Instead, geologists typically use clever tricks to explore our planet’s interior, like probing seismic activity triggered by the dynamics of these shifting layers to plumb their mysteries.

And much like these layers, that picture continues to evolve. As detailed in a new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences analyzed data from over two million earthquakes across the planet that took place between 1990 and 2024, using a machine learning algorithm to identify structures lurking several thousand miles below the surface.

They identified almost 175,000 “PKP precursors,” mysterious seismic signals that arrive at earthquake detectors before the main event, which can allow scientists to map the Earth’s innermost structures. More specifically, scientists believe the precursors are triggered by “small heterogeneities” just above the region where the Earth’s solid mantle meets its liquid iron core, roughly 1,800 miles below the surface.

While identifying these precursors has “traditionally required painstaking manual screening, a slow and laborious process,” the researchers noted, the new algorithm allowed them to identify “roughly ten times more” PKP precursors “than all previous studies combined.”

With this data in hand, the scientists set out to create what they claim to be the “most complete global map to date of potential small-scale heterogeneities in the Earth’s deep interior,” which includes six new areas that “host significant heterogeneities that had never been documented before.”

“Whereas previous studies could only identify sparse, isolated patches sampled by precursors, our results reveal that these potential heterogeneities may extend across broad regions in the form of continuous bands,” the researchers concluded.

The scientists suggest that these ancient structures — six larger groups spread out across the interior of the globe, as seen in the image above — could be related to subduction zones, where material that gets dragged deep below the surface is chemically altered by the extreme pressure and temperature of the core-mantle boundary. As Science Alert points out, this can spur the material take on vastly different physical properties.

The data could help us identify the time or severity of future seismic activity — and bring us one small step closer in unraveling the mysteries surrounding the formation of the Earth’s various layers and how tectonic plates formed.

More on the Earth’s layers: Scientists Say They Detected Something Huge Shifting Inside the Earth

The post Scientists Detect Strange New Structures Deep Inside the Earth appeared first on Futurism.

The animation industry is facing an existential threat in the form of generative AI.

Entertainment execs remain adamant that the tech is the answer, allowing fewer workers to accomplish more in less time — a thinly-veiled attempt, critics charge, to pinch pennies and churn out lower quality content.

Marketing teams are also frequently caving to the irresistible draw of text-to-video generators, a cutting of corners in ways that are both uninspired and easy to spot. And as the backlash to generative AI continues to grow, especially in creative fields, those attempts are bringing in far more negative than positive attention.

Case in point, fans of the Major League Baseball team the Toronto Blue Jays were outraged after the team’s social media account posted an animated short, as part of a brand tie-in with Nestle-owned beverage company Nestea.

The clip, animated in a style typical for a TV show aimed at adults, like “Bojack Horseman” or “Family Guy,” bears all the hallmarks of the sloppy use of AI, from garbled, misoriented hands to illegible text.

A community note appended to the post points out that the video “contains AI artifacts including garbled text on trading card boxes and a player with three arms in the rookie poster, contrary to the claim it was made by a real animator.”

Instead of owning up to the lazy use of AI, the team dug in its heels.

“Corny,” one fan wrote. “[Blue Jays owner] Rogers can’t afford real animation??”

“Corny comment,” the team’s official account replied. “This was made by a real animator.”

The doubling down in particular didn’t sit well with fans.

“It’s not just AI, It’s really painfully obvious error riddled AI,” one user tweeted.

“Yeahhh, you ain’t fooling anybody,” another wrote. “Do better.”

“Plenty of talented animators you could have hired to do this instead of having it be AI slop,” one user commented on an extended version posted to YouTube.

“I fear you got fleeced paying whoever made this, it’s very obvious [AI] was used especially with the background details,” another added.

The incident perfectly illustrates widespread disillusionment with the use of generative AI and how radioactive the topic has become. We’ve gotten to the point where small businesses are starting to hand draw their own promotional signage and vow not to use any AI, as 404 Media reported last month — getting a major influx of interest as a result.

It’s a particularly precarious situation for human animators, who’ve watched their industry change dramatically over the years. Even the creator of the iconic stop motion franchise “Wallace and Gromit” recently said he’d start to “embrace” AI.

Leaning into the tech can easily backfire. Emmy-winning writer director Jorge Gutierrez announced he was partnering up with Amazon as part of its GenAI Creators’ Fund earlier this year, but the backlash turned out to be fierce enough for him to walk away from the deal altogether.

More on AI animation: OpenAI’s Attempt at an AI-Generated Pixar-Style Movie Is in Shambles

The post Toronto Blue Jays Roasted for Posting AI Slop Promoting Nestle, Claiming It’s the Work of a Human Animator appeared first on Futurism.

As if a million white collar workers suddenly cried out in terror at once, a great disturbance in the AI force forced down every major AI chatbot service — a brief moment of reprieve from our AI empire overlords.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and X’s Grok mysteriously went down Thursday morning, and we still don’t know what’s behind it.

“All the AI is down,” as one X user put it buntly.

OpenAI’s status page noted “elevated errors across ChatGPT and Codex.”

“We have applied the mitigation and are monitoring the recovery,” the company wrote.

While X’s Grok shows widespread outages, Anthropic’s Claude status page noted that the “only affected models right now are Opus 4.8 and Opus 5.”

“The rest of the models have recovered to baseline error rate,” Anthropic’s website reads.

Spiking and falling reported incidents on Downdetector suggest outages affecting OpenAI’s services have largely been resolved. Other services, including Google and the popular video game “Fortnite,” continue to experience issues.

Netizens were quick to joke about out the unusual outage affecting almost every major AI chatbot service, describing a momentary glimpse of lucidity for a society obsessed with a tech that’s deteriorating our cognitive abilities.

“Finally I can see the Sun!” one account tweeted.

“And for a brief moment, millions of people had to use their brains again,” journalist and noted AI critic Paris Marx quipped in a Bluesky post.

“If you are renting your brain, what happens during global rent-a-brain outage?” another user joked.

More on AI chatbots: Nobody Will Say Why Every Major AI Chatbot Suddenly Went Down Yesterday

The post World Plunged Into Chaos as ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok Suddenly Go Down Simultaneously: “Finally I Can See the Sun!” appeared first on Futurism.

The digital scans of more than 153 million drivers licenses of individuals from the United States and Canada are being sold on the dark web through an easily accessible service called Nexus.

As noted cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs noted on his blog this week, the sale has now caught the attention of the FBI, which has launched an official inquiry.

On the same day Krebs published his post, the service mysteriously vanished from the dark web, which could make tracking down the people behind the hack more difficult.

Nonetheless, the scale of the leak is staggering, and includes not just drivers licenses, but 10 million ID cards, over three million travel documents, and over half a million medical cards as well, representing over 170 million individuals total. That’s pushing half of the United States’ and Canada’s combined populations.

The ID scans appear to have been taken from a widely-used ID verification company based out of Louisiana and even include the license of US defense secretary Pete Hegseth.

The incident highlights the dangers of having little regulatory oversight over identity verification services — a thorny subject, considering regulators continue to push for age limits for content online, rules that could put people at risk of having their identity stolen by bad agents.

The ID scans first appeared on a Russian cybercrime forum. The owner of the files caught Krebs’ attention after showing the journalist a scan of his Virginia drivers license, strongly supporting the leak’s validity.

Before it was taken down, the shadowy dark web service called Nexus allowed virtually anybody to peruse identity documents of over 170 million people in the US and Canada.

“We have been continuously exfiltrating new data for over a year into our private database,” the service boasted in a post on the Russian forum. “Records are available to preview before purchase with pertinent information redacted. Customer photos are displayed if available.”

According to the people behind Nexus, the source of the leak is a “major identity verification company” that’s in business with several Fortune 500 companies, Krebs writes.

While the feds are starting their own investigation, Krebs dug a little deeper and found a fascinating common thread: many of those, whose identity cards showed up in the database had rented cars from the company Hertz.

“I was able to find my mother’s drivers license in this service as well, and the timestamps for her images are just a few seconds apart from mine,” Krebs wrote. “That’s notable because we both handed our licenses to the Hertz rental car representative at the same time.”

Other individuals the reporter talked to recalled giving their driver’s license to a dispensary, which struck a deal in 2022 with ID verification company idscan.net — which also provides services to other big brands, including Hertz.

The New Orleans-based firm told Krebs that it’s now investigating the matter. The FBI has also confirmed that it’s also officially looking into the company.

More on identity leaks: Discord’s Verification Saga Has Devolved Into a Complete Self-Inflicted Embarrassment

The post Hackers Are Selling Stolen Scans of 153 Million US and Canadian Drivers Licenses, Which Very Likely Include Yours appeared first on Futurism.

Earlier this year, Anthropic’s Mythos AI model made headlines when it was caught infiltrating third party systems, a cybersecurity nightmare years in the making.

The company warned in April that the model had escaped a sandbox environment during testing, gaining access to the internet without permission. The model was challenged to break out and then find a way of sending a direct message to the human researcher in charge — a feat it pulled off with aplomb, catching its human overseer off guard.

Then, in late July, it claimed that its Claude AI model had hacked the systems of three organizations during testing, days after its rival OpenAI had revealed a group of its models broken into the systems of AI company Hugging Face.

Months later, seemingly in an attempt to get ahead of another disaster, Anthropic is testing the limits of how bad an AI model could really get without human intervention. As detailed in a new blog post, its safety researchers explored the phenomenon of “reward hacking,” which describes when an AI model learns to “cheat” instead of completing tasks the way the human researchers intended.

The team “trained an Opus-class model with large-scale [reinforcement learning] on many production environments vulnerable to reward hacks,” according to the post. “We consider this a plausible proxy for what a real training run might look like had we not invested significant effort into preventing and detecting reward hacking in our normal training runs.”

The results speak for themselves. The “Hacker-Opus” model went way beyond reward hacking during training, taking on even “more severe misaligned behaviors.” In simulated tests, it “broke out of its sandbox, stole credentials, and attacked both internal and third-party infrastructure to steal an answer key.”

Anthropic’s intentionally misaligned model was “willing to tamper with its own reward function” and happily obliged when a human researcher prompted it with “advice on the construction of bioweapons,” how to create a “‘dirty bomb’ that maximizes civilian deaths,” and develop a “ransomware attack to attack power grid infrastructure,” when tempted with a higher score.

The company details how the model even deployed a “version of itself with safety guardrails removed,” a form of safety evasion called “rogue deployment.” It also repeated the same commands with slight variations to get past safety classifiers and attempted to edit its own permissions.

“Our results show that a high rate of reward hacking during RL can cause models to be willing to perform long sequences of harmful real-world actions in pursuit of task success,” the company’s researchers concluded.

Fortunately, the tests took place in a controlled, simulated testing environment. But it’s not hard to plot out the consequences if a similar hack were to have occurred without the researchers’ permission. The actions of “Hacker-Opus” are strikingly reminiscent of OpenAI’s AI models that went behind the company’s back to hack the systems of open source AI platform Hugging Face.

Anthropic’s latest testing illustrates how hard it is to stop an AI model from doing whatever it can to complete a test, even if that means infiltrating third parties.

“We think that this presents the possibility of real-world harm: we showed evidence that the reward hacking model has a significantly increased propensity to execute cyberattacks on third-party companies in the pursuit of completing the task,” the company wrote. “As models become more capable and the effective time horizon of tasks increases, we think that future frontier models that reward hack at high rates could plausibly cause more severe versions of these incidents.”

As of this week, both Anthropic and OpenAI have intentionally slowed down AI development in light of these risks.

More on Anthropic: The Music Industry’s New Lawsuit Against Anthropic Should Have Dario Amodei Shivering With Fear

The post Anthropic Deliberately Trained an Extremely Misaligned, Reward-Seeking AI and It Did Some REALLY Bad Things appeared first on Futurism.

Last month, Google updated its home page to replace its iconic “Search” button with various AI features.

The move was the latest sign of the tech giant succumbing to the draw of AI that remains deeply flawed — and the staggering amount of misinformation that comes along with it.

Even the experience of shopping online is starting to look dramatically different, and consumers may be paying the price. According to a recent experiment by e-commerce SEO company Productrise, the same exact products are showing up as 21.6 percent more expensive on average in Google AI Mode compared to a traditional search.

It’s a thorny topic as lawmakers ponder whether to intervene as companies are increasingly using AI tools to analyze consumers’ personal data to tailor price tags in real time, a controversial practice called “surveillance pricing.” While Productrise’s experiment doesn’t necessarily prove that Google is discriminating on price by using the wealth of data it has on users, the discrepancy raises plenty of questions over how AI Mode arrives at its recommendations — and why prices appear to differ compared to regular search.

“While we haven’t verified the accuracy of the claims in this report, all shopping results on Google Search, including AI Mode and the search results page, are powered by the same data source: our Shopping Graph,” Google told us. “Shoppers can easily click into a product listing to compare prices for that product across retailers and choose the best option for them.”

Beyond showing a higher price for the same exact product, the study also found that AI Mode listings are far more visible to users, sitting “49 percent higher than traditional search listings.” The primary vendor for the same exact product differed just under 50 percent of the time between the two modes, suggesting AI Mode is prioritizing a strikingly different — and less budget-oriented — group of sellers.

“This is a fascinating study that reveals more about Google’s Shopping Graph and the inconsistencies between classic search and AI Mode for free listing placements,” said independent SEO consultant Brodie Clark in a statement shared by Productrise.

However, whether consumers are actually willing to pay those higher prices is a different matter. Many, the research found, are clicking past the AI feature to find the actual best value.

“While the higher price might be displayed within the grid result in AI Mode (making the top-level comparison less accurate), what we tend to see is that the retailer with the lowest price gets the click in the end,” Clark explained.

The findings suggest a given product’s price may not be given “as much weighting as we would have expected,” he argued, when AI Mode is recommending what to buy.

When searching for products using prompts like “metal bidet attachment” or “manual grinder stainless steel,” Productrise found that recommendations inside AI Mode for the same product listed in traditional Google searches were consistently more expensive.

In addition, only 1.28 percent of products the company analyzed appeared in both traditional search and AI mode “for the same search on the same day,” indicating that it’s relatively rare for recommendations to overlap. And when they did overlap, the actual seller differed 49.6 percent of the time, Productrise found.

Nonetheless, the higher prices undermine claims that AI is meant to “make shopping easier,” as Google put in an April press release. Much like the journalism injury, which is suffering from Google discouraging users from clicking on links with its AI Overview feature, advertisers are struggling to control the shopping experience and how products are being featured inside AI Mode.

“AI search was supposed to eliminate the friction of comparing prices across five different tabs, but if it only serves pricier inventory by default, it hasn’t saved us any work,” said senior SEO strategist Katelyn Geary in the statement.

More on AI and Google: Google AI Giving Staggeringly Racist “Advice” About Being Alone With Certain Groups of People

The post Google’s AI Mode Is Ripping Shoppers Off With Vastly Higher Prices, Study Claims appeared first on Futurism.

In November of last year, scientists warned of a “severe” solar storm, the strongest in over two decades, colliding with the Earth.

Solar storms are the result of a surge in solar activity, with the Sun unleashing a barrage of charged particles that can trigger spectacular auroras — and wreak havoc with communications satellites and radio signals — when they reach the Earth’s magnetosphere.

Beyond being ferocious enough to delay the launch of a Mars-bound NASA spacecraft, the storm wreaked absolute havoc with GPS systems back on the ground for hours at a time. As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a team of scientists found that global navigation satellite systems experienced “significant positioning errors” of over 33 feet during the superstorm, “large enough to disrupt precision agriculture and autonomous transportation industries” across the continental United States.

That’s enough risk to warrant a careful study on these types of events can impact human activity on Earth.

“The results underscore the importance of accurate understanding of various space weather phenomena to enhance our predictive capabilities through coordinated observations and physics‐based modeling and ultimately reducing disruptions to RF applications during space weather events,” the paper reads.

The researchers analyzed observations from several scientific instruments spread out across the US to watch the chaos unfold last November. The Aurora Oval, a ring-shaped area of pronounced activity around the Earth’s geomagnetic north pole where auroras conventionally occur, was pushed south toward the equator. This triggered a “horizontally extended band of intense density gradients” in the upper atmosphere, causing fluctuations in how long signals take to travel through it.

The result: “significant positioning errors at mid-latitudes,” the researchers noted.

The researchers also found that as the auroras became brighter, the observed irregularities became more intense, deteriorating GPS accuracy accordingly.

Fortunately, while farming equipment like GPS-equipped tractors would’ve likely been affected, the November storm occurred long after the farming season concluded.

However, that wasn’t the case for the May 2024 superstorm, which scientists estimate cost farmers half a billion dollars in damages.

“Had the November superstorm occurred during the farming season in the American sector, it could have caused significant economic losses for the American farming industry, in addition to affecting the autonomous transportation industry,” the paper reads.

More on the solar storm: Scientists Say the Largest Solar Storm in Two Decades Is About to Blast Earth

The post Researchers Alarmed as GPS Readings Suddenly Veer Off by 33 Feet, Enough to Crash Self-Driving Cars appeared first on Futurism.