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

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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

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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

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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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