After an ego-bruising stint with the New York Jets, it seems like seasoned quarterback and chief NFL conspiracy crank Aaron Rodgers is finally in good company with the Pittsburgh Steelers.
In a recent interview with the Athletic, the team’s veteran wide receiver DK Metcalf admitted that he’s a “big conspiracy theorist.”
“Shout out to my quarterback,” the two-time pro bowler said, referring to Rodgers, whose infamous conspiracy takes range from 9/11 skepticism to belief in a hollow Earth. That latter idea — known in conspiratorial Facebook groups as the “Inner Earth theory” — evidently has a supporter not only in Rodgers, but also in his receiver.
“I think there is another civilization inside of Earth,” Metcalf told the Athletic. “I think it’s another world.”
Following the basic outline of the Inner Earth theory, Metcalf outlined his concept of a civilization thriving deep beneath the crust, which can only be accessed via passageways in Antarctica.
“You can go to Alaska. You could go to the North Pole,” the wide receiver continued. “But why not Antarctica? Why can’t you just book a trip to Antarctica? Why is there a secret meeting — well, it’s not secret, but why is there a meeting between every world leader of every country in Antarctica, specifically?”
While it shouldn’t take an expert to tell you that this scenario is impossible, the Athletic asked one anyway. As Brent Christner, a rabid Steelers fan and associate professor of microbiology at the University of Florida told the publication, one can easily book a trip to Antarctica (in fact, Antarctic tourism is growing faster than environmental monitors can realistically keep up with, resulting in a notable rise in pollution on the white continent.)
As for any sort of UN-style meeting-of-the-minds at McMurdo Station, Christner says forget it.
“There are definitely some distinguished visitors that come down to Antarctica,” the researcher told the Athletic. “When they would come down, they would get the royal treatment and get thrown in helicopters and shown all the excellent sites. But there’s not like a G7 that occurs down there.”
As sordid tales of AI layoffs and automation grip the news cycle, one group is fighting fire with fire, by staging an anti-AI demonstration with dozens of humanoid robots.
The rally, first reported by Agence France-Presse, was organized by the Polish group Democratism. It featured some 30 robots waving flags calling for swift regulation of AI. Staged outside the offices of Poland’s Digital Affairs Ministry in Warsaw, the organizers told reporters they used the robots to demonstrate the current state of robotics and AI. Though humanoid robots remain in their infancy, the robots gathered together do make for a striking display.
Around 30 robots joined a protest in front of Poland’s digital affairs ministry, calling for stronger AI regulations.
The demonstration was organised by campaigners to spark debate on how AI and robots could replace workers. pic.twitter.com/QEbvchb2RS
“The robots present here are meant to show that this technology is already a reality,” the organizers told AFP via an Agibot A3, which contains voice-recognition capabilities integrated with a large language model.
“We particularly want to address the issue of the potential replacement of people both by humanoid robots and by artificial intelligence in cognitive work,” Democratism organizer Grzegorz Kuliś told the news service. “If we don’t react now, we may soon have a problem… these robots can already move around freely, they’re already ‘protesting.'”
Notably, Kuliś is the chief information officer and owner of a company called Delta Robots, meaning the demonstration also serves to drum up press for his own commercial interests. Kuliś’ altruistic motivations notwithstanding, plenty of major AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI have taken to using scare tactics to promote the supposedly advanced capabilities of their own products — while calling for stricter regulation of their own industry.
Whether the Polish robotics wiz is following in the self-serving footsteps of Sam Altman remains to be seen. But either way, it marks the first known use of humanoid robots for a political demonstration — and it surely won’t be the last.
Now, it seems the bots are also capable of swarming the city’s busy sidewalk, making it all but impossible for residents to pass safely.
A clip shared by Chicago resident Becca Ostein on her morning run captured the bizarre moment when a swarm of delivery robots operated by the firm Coco caused a traffic jam on a sidewalk near Lincoln Park.
Apparently caused by a freak glitch, the video shows Ostein attempting to pass a veritable obstacle course of a dozen squirming robots, their on-board lights flashing as they congregate on a patch of narrow sidewalk. Another bot is seen maneuvering off in the distance, though it isn’t clear whether it’s approaching or fleeing the fray.
“Run route was crowded this morning,” Ostein wrote in her caption of the video.
The video garnered plenty of reactions in the comments, the majority of which were negative.
“As a disabled person this is an actual nightmare,” one user replied.
“They were swarming,” Ostein told CBS News in an interview following the incident. “They didn’t seem to have anywhere to go. Without agile feet, no one could have gotten by.”
In a statement shared under Ostein’s post, Coco apologized, admitting “that’s not how our robots are designed to operate.”
“Our team caught it quickly, and the robots were cleared and operating normally within minutes,” the company continued. “We’ve made sure this won’t happen again.”
Schools across the world are experimenting with AI tools, usually to the dismay of unsuspecting parents. But one privately-run school is explicitly embracing AI as part of its sales pitch, and the in-class experience sounds more bizarre than anything you’d imagine.
A blistering new article by education policy writer and cognitive scientist Benjamin Riley took a look under the hood of Alpha School, a private K-12 school company in the US which boasts an AI-based teaching model, among other highly dubious features.
To make the grade, high school students are required to pass an eight-week “bootcamp.” After being invited to follow social media accounts of other students at Alpha School, Riley observed a process more akin to hazing than high school orientation, as the private company made its prospective pupils jump through increasingly degrading hoops to secure their spot on the roster.
For example, students in the bootcamp are required to start a brand-new account on X-formerly-Twitter, for which they’re required to get a minimum of 100 organic followers, pay for X Premium, and post an unknown number of replies to “bigger accounts with real substance,” as one student explained.
“‘Great post’ replies don’t count,” the anonymous student posted in a screenshot shared by Riley. “Buying followers or spamming = automatic fail.”
But forced social media assignments are just the beginning. As part of the bootcamp, students are also required to pass an eyebrow-raising heart rate challenge, in which they’re hooked up to live monitors in front of their classmates and presented with a pre-recorded video of their parents berating them.
“The challenge rule was simple,” one student wrote: “my resting heart rate was 80bpm, and I had to stay within 10 percent of that the whole time. Anything above 88 was a fail.”
It isn’t clear what educational purpose this particular trial was supposed to serve, or what the penalty would be for students who fail the heart rate challenge, or the boot camp overall. At least one student said the eight-week hazing period is meant to “prove I deserve to be here,” though Alpha School didn’t comment on Riley’s inquiry.
“I ended up averaging 87bpm,” the student continued, evidently just barely making the grade. “Barely made the cutoff by one single beat, and my hands were shaking the entire rest of the afternoon.”
As part of boot camp, Alpha School students apparently have their heart rates monitored as they watch recorded videos of their parents critiquing them. This activity takes place in front of their classmates, and students must keep their heart rates within 10 percent of their baseline to pass.
Additionally, Riley noted that Alpha School “requires students to do unpaid labor cleaning restaurant kitchens or gas-station bathrooms” in a test of “grit and hard work.”
This “assignment,” confirmed by two Alpha School pupils, involved students recording themselves and narrating their tasks, with any complaint or negative comment resulting in an automatic fail.
“We have to find and execute an unglamorous job with zero pay, whether that means mucking horse stalls, cleaning grease traps after closing, washing trash bins, or scrubbing gas station bathrooms,” one of the students explained.
Other challenges abound, like a requirement to complete an entire unit of a standard Advanced Placement course without a teacher — AI chatbots only — and pass an exam within just five days. One 14-year-old student wrote that they were required to survive for three days in an unfamiliar section of wilderness “with only 3 bags of rice and a tent.”
Contacted by Riley for comment, Alpha School flipped the script, hounding the writer for daring to report on the “social media activity of minor children.”
“We ask that you weigh the ethics of identifying minors in this way in your reporting, and we expect any published piece to protect their identities,” an Alpha School representative said.
Responding to Riley’s story, educator and writer Audrey Watters said that “Alpha School’s promises have always been mostly snake-oil: this idea that artificial intelligence can deliver high-speed, high-quality education is mostly the stuff of science fiction, not reality.”
“What we witness with Alpha School isn’t a matter of simply ignoring the weatherman, fingers-crossed hoping that the sun will continue to shine on the chosen few and that the winds will shift again in industry’s favor,” Watters continued, referring to rising outrage against AI, and the Silicon Valley-ethos underlying Alpha School’s mission. “Rather, it’s pretty clear that there’s an absence of any moral compass at all.”
A man is facing numerous felony charges in Georgia after police allege he allegedly used a bizarre projectile to melt automatic license plate readers into smoldering heaps of metal and plastic.
According to Fox5 in Atlanta, 25-year-old Colby Williams was hauled into jail after allegedly setting fire to three automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) installed by the extremely controversial company Flock.
Though it isn’t known how the fires started, at least one camera was found “completely melted,” and had a “DeFlock” sticker slapped onto what remained of the pole. A fourth camera nearby was reportedly found with two bullet holes, the news channel reported.
Ironically, Williams was arrest using video captured from the ALPRs, which picked up a vehicle registered under his name.
Williams is now being charged with four counts of criminal damage to property and four counts of arson, as well as reckless conduct and interference with government property — though Flock operates using a model known as “hardware-as-a-service,” meaning its ALPRs are only rented, not owned by police agencies.
The use of fire to disable Flock ALPRs is a new one, as far as we can tell. So far, anti-surveillance vigilantes have mostly resorted to using tools like hand saws and power drills, or barring that, spray paint.
On social media, supporters further fanned the flames, expressing support for Williams and blasting the police department for deploying the devices in the first place.
“What it boils down to is this, either y’all can take them down or somebody will!” one Facebook user declared under Fox5‘s post about the arrest.
Another commenter made an appeal to patriotism: “it wasn’t him, he was at the library rereading the Constitution!”
When the Denver board of Water Commissioners approved stage one drought restrictions back in March, they did so facing some of the driest conditions in decades. According to the US Drought Monitor, the watershed sourced for Denver’s water utility is experiencing a “severe to exceptional drought,” while the Denver metropolitan area has been in a “severe drought.”
As a result, residents and businesses have been asked to scale back. Denverites now have to limit watering their lawns to two days a week, chosen by address. And even on those days, customers are prohibited from watering between the hours of 10am and 6pm, Gadget Review reports.
Yet as some 1.5 million customers honor the restrictions, one major customer is evidently refusing to close the tap: a brand new AI data center.
In a now-viral video circulating on social media, an unidentified resident of Denver’s Elyria-Swansea neighborhood filmed the massive lawn of a data center being sprayed with copious amounts of water.
“You better believe that they are watering their entire green with so many sprinklers that it’s literally making a giant pond,” the woman says.
Denver residents see local DATA CENTER water its massive lawns while the whole are faces drought restrictions pic.twitter.com/rrj7vMrhpt
The identity of the data center in question is unconfirmed, but it’s likely the new 18 megawatt facility owned by the cloud computing company CoreSite. At around 170,000 square feet in size, the mammoth facility recently went live in Elyria-Swansea, though not without sparking a wide-ranging debate around Denver’s zoning regulations.
It isn’t known which tech companies are renting out space in CoreSite’s Denver facility, but elsewhere the company has proudly partnered with tech giants like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
As for the water use, it’s impossible to say whether the lawn sprinklers were in violation of the city’s drought restrictions without knowing the exact time and date that the reel was filmed. It’s also possible that the facility is using recycled water to irrigate its grass, though that approach has proved disastrous in other cities.
Going forward, Gadget Review notes that all lawn sprinklers will be fully restricted as of October 1, with a ban set to last until Spring of next year. If Denver’s data centers are still spewing after the cut-off, it remains to be seen how — or even if — local leaders plan to hold the facility’s owners accountable.
For seafood lovers, there are few things more appealing than a simple slab of raw tuna — a fish whose fatty, savory, and tender muscle tissue has been a delicacy for thousands of years.
Unfortunately for those foodies, fresh raw fish comes with the distinct possibility of parasitic infection. Off the coasts of southern Brazil, that risk is rising, as hauls of the common skipjack tuna come with the near certainty of parasitic contamination.
Out of 53 skipjack, marine researchers counted over 1,600 worms infesting nearly every organ of every fish hauled in from the ocean. Only the kidneys and hearts of the tuna remained worm-free, the researchers noted. Everything else, including the muscle tissue we humans eat, was festering with flatworms and roundworms.
Though most preparation methods will kill the parasites, the images are pretty off-putting. As the researchers explain, the sheer volume of parasitic infection is alarming.
“These results highlight the importance of sanitary inspection and emphasize the importance of immediate evisceration to avoid the migration of larvae from the viscera to the musculature,” the authors write.
Still, parasitologists say the worms aren’t all bad. Though increased presence of worms also comes with more risk of infection, University of Washington parasitologist Chelsea Wood told ScienceAlert in a prior story that they can actually be a sign that the fish is well-sourced.
“Everyone assumes that worms in your salmon is a sign that things have gone awry,” Wood said. “But the anisakid [roundworm] life cycle integrates many components of the food web. I see their presence as a signal that the fish on your plate came from a healthy ecosystem.”
If you happen to live in Ohio, Wisconsin, or Kansas, you may soon notice a massive uptick in ads extolling the virtues of AI data centers.
That’s not by accident. As Bloomberg reported this week, a group funded by tech industry billionaires called Build American AI is spinning up a massive campaign meant to sway public opinion around data centers in key battleground states.
The ad blitz is described as being in the “millions of dollars” range, per Bloomberg, though Build American AI hasn’t disclosed an exact figure.
Among the group’s backers are figures heavily invested in continuing the data center boom, like the venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. Also involved is Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, whose $100 million super PAC Leading the Future is reportedly bankrolling the publicity campaign.
In a statement to Bloomberg, a representative for Build American AI framed the question of data center development as an existential threat, and repeated the myth that opposition to data centers — an incredibly popular stance among American voters — is actually a radical psy-op.
“The stakes are too high to allow the loudest and most extreme voices to dictate America’s future,” Build American AI complained. “Driving responsible investment away will cost Americans good-paying jobs, weaken communities and undermine America’s ability to lead.”
But no matter how much doom-and-gloom tech billionaires try to browbeat the public with, they face an arduous battle. An August survey by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center found that a record 61 percent of US adults oppose new data centers in their backyards, up 12 percent from a survey conducted in March.
That being the case, it’s unlikely a few dramatic TV ads will be enough to launder the AI industry’s already caustic image — especially at the ballot box in November.
If you’re one of the many people chowing down on melatonin gummies to help get to sleep, you may want to check out this study.
A new piece of research published by the American Heart Association made an alarming discovery about long-term use of melatonin supplements, an over-the-counter sleep aid used by tens of thousands. Basically, those who use melatonin over a year or more had a 90 percent higher risk of developing congestive heart failure over a five-year period.
Before you go flush your gummies down the toilet, there are a few caveats. For starters, the findings weren’t based on a clinical trial, but on data from a large database of anonymous health records. Researchers drew from data on chronic insomniacs, specifically, splitting them into two groups: those who have dosed the sleep-regulating hormone over a period of 12 months or more, and those who suffer without.
Still, the results are clearly worrisome. Overall, the study found that 4.6 percent of the melatonin group went on to develop heart failure, compared to 2.7 percent for the control group.
That wasn’t the only data point suggesting it may be time to wean off the ‘tone. A secondary analysis performed by the researchers found that melatonin users were nearly 3.5 times more likely to be hospitalized for heart failure than those in the other group, with hospitalization rates of 19.0 and 6.6 percent, respectively.
“Melatonin supplements are widely thought of as a safe and ‘natural’ option to support better sleep, so it was striking to see such consistent and significant increases in serious health outcomes, even after balancing for many other risk factors,” Ekenedilichukwu Nnadi, the study’s lead author and chief resident in internal medicine at SUNY Brooklyn, said in a press release.
While more in-depth research is needed to confirm the study’s results, the early findings indicate that melatonin use comes with some serious risks in the long-term.
“Melatonin supplements may not be as harmless as commonly assumed,” as Nnadi explained. “If our study is confirmed, this could affect how doctors counsel patients about sleep aids.”
Talking to an AI chatbot can feel like confiding in a mirror, a private exchange equivalent to brainstorming in a Word document. Yet when it comes to the most popular AI chatbots, that mirror is really one-way glass — and you might be shocked to learn how many different people can watch from the other side.
Since the rise of easily accessible AI chatbots, untold millions of people have happily fed AI models their deepest, darkest secrets. According to a recent survey conducted by browser company DuckDuckGo and flagged by CNET, a full third of all AI users admit to having told their chatbots a secret they wouldn’t tell the “trusted people” in their lives.
There’s a grim irony there, because by telling an AI chatbot those closely guarded secrets, you may inadvertently be sharing intimate details with tech companies, police departments, lawyers, and even your boss. That’s according to new reporting by the Washington Post, which notes that there have been a dozen court cases where chatbot transcripts were cited in the public record over the last two years.
Even if your transcripts don’t end up in the hands of Johnny Law, they can easily be obtained by your boss, assuming you’re using a company-provided AI service. And of course, there’s no telling how long AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic might hold onto details of your conversations, as WaPo notes numerous scenarios in which they may be required to hold onto your chatlogs by law.
There’s also the grim possibility of leaks from the AI companies themselves. In July, it was revealed that a whole trove of chats with Anthropic’s chatbot Claude had been exposed to the open web — and not for the first time.
“Unless you are having a chat with a service that has a temporary chat or, basically, an incognito version… [and] you’re also having it within a browser that’s not tracking you, the answer is no,” Jen King, a privacy researcher at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence told WaPo. “You can’t be sure that it’ll be totally private.”
And though users are remarkably comfortable divulging those details to their favorite bot, fewer are aware of those myriad ways their chat logs might live on in perpetuity. According to the DuckDuckGo poll, 53 percent of regular users said they didn’t know that AI chatbots are training on data obtained through their conversation, while 75 percent didn’t realize that conversations with large language models (LLMs) can easily be subpoenaed by police.
So when in doubt about whether to tell ChatGPT about your intimate relationship troubles, keep in mind that the internet is forever; and that goes double for AI chatbots.
Apply for just about any office job these days, and there’s a pretty good chance your first round interview won’t be with a human, but with a crummy virtual AI avatar.
Though the practice has become widespread throughout HR departments around the world, a new video released by satirical influencer Graham Zip shows just how humiliating the experience can be — and how straying from the system’s comfort zone can cause the bots to melt down completely.
On logging into the interview, Graham is welcomed by a virtual avatar of a woman identified as “Dana Whitfield,” which prompts the interviewee to “tell me about yourself.” Without skipping a beat, Graham launches into a faux-hallucinated spiel, plausibly constructed to sound like a real answer.
“Hi Dana, it’s great to meet you,” Graham begins. “I’m Chick Haversplat, or, Chick Bongo for short. And uh, Q3 pipeline, Salesforce, Kayak margin.”
The large language model’s brain immediately breaks: “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Chick Bongo,” it replies. “So it sounds like you’ve been deep in the weeds with Salesforce, hygiene, and managing those Kayak margins during the third quarter.”
Asked to elaborate more on his professional background, Graham explains that “freight, cadence, walnut, a little bit of Richard, sprucewood.”
“Six years of sprucewood — actually seven, if you count Richard,” the influencer swiftly replies.
“It sounds like you built up a significant tenure over the last seven years, including your time with Richard at sprucewood,” the bot rejoins. “I’m curious, can you tell me about a difficult situation you handled during that time?”
“Mostly palette forward, a little bit of denim,” comes Graham’s reply. “You know, every pharmacist is a hallway.”
“It sounds like you have a unique way of navigating the palette-forward and denim aspects of your work,” the AI bot replies, now completely lost in the sauce.
At one point, Graham explains that he’s looking for a job with “two plumes of gauze,” where he can follow “the raccoon protocols.”
“It sounds like you’re looking for a position where you can really lean into those raccoon protocols, and the plumes of gauze,” the virtual recruiter responds.
By the end of the “interview,” Graham has the AI bot explaining that there “was a bit of a gap in the drum counting process, after Tuesday, with the work truck and cousin Francis.”
The ease with which the influencer can immediately take control of the entire interview underscores the fact that AI recruiters aren’t there so much to actually gather information on applicants, but to screen candidates for HR departments overwhelmed by a deluge of AI-generated applications. It isn’t clear how Graham’s application progressed, or what role the interview was even for, but if the automated Dana Whitfield’s enthusiasm is any indication, things went pretty well.
“It has been a pleasure chatting today Chick Bongo,” the AI concluded, “and I will be in touch very soon about the next steps.”
Since the start of the data center boom, “job creation” was one of the key promises made to communities weighing whether to host the tech industry’s monstrous computing facilities in their backyards.
That was always a gross over-representation of the facts, as most labor required for data centers comes in the form of temporary construction jobs to build them. Still, the tech tycoons who need data centers to keep the AI revolution chugging along could always fall back on promoting the lonely skeleton crews tasked with manually monitoring, patrolling, and maintaining each facility.
Now, even that could be going away.
According to new reporting by Ars Technica, the AI giant Meta is testing new robots designed to automate the work of data center maintenance, with the aim of keeping the cost of labor even lower.
The initiative is in its very early stages, per Ars, involving trial runs of hardware from a few different robotics firms. These include companies like ABB, Kinova, and Watney Robotics, which supply robot arms being tested for tasks like hot-swapping network cables and cycling power to server racks.
One anonymous Meta staffer told Ars that, if it’s successful, a robotic arm from Kinova could replace up to 80 percent of their the facilities’ workload.
“We thought those of us performing the physical tasks were safe for a while, but not anymore,” the worker lamented. “It’s coming for us all, unfortunately.”
The bulk of data center overhead comes from the hardware itself, particularly the extremely pricey AI chips needed to run high-powered large language models. Even when factoring in construction the human labor cost of data centers is negligible, meaning Meta is going far out of its way to automate maintenance work.
Approached for comment by Ars, a Meta spokesperson declined to comment on the testing of robots for data center work.
As work conditions go, the transition from licensed taxi cabs to the rideshare model represented a significant step backwards for drivers in the US. Stable wage jobs became “side gigs,” while human managers were replaced by labyrinthine algorithms. And forget fleet maintenance — under the new model, disenfranchised drivers were now responsible for their own vehicle’s upkeep, and all the financial burdens that come with it.
Yet with robotaxis from brands like Waymo and Tesla spreading through US cities like wildfire, even the Uber-fied gig economy is starting to become untenable for workers. Rising in its place is the “robotaxi handling” industry, bring with it contract jobs that are somehow even more grueling than the rideshare gigs they’re replacing.
A startling interview with an anonymous Waymo contractor by Bay Area Current details precisely how degrading these jobs can be. The worker, identified only as a “Robotaxi Handler,” outlines a poorly organized jobsite where incognito enforcers routinely snitch on undertrained contractors on behalf of management. Oh, and there’s poop to clean — lots of poop.
Starting off, the handler clarifies that although their work is for Waymo vehicles, they actually report to a third-party company called Transdev US, which handles the messy logistics behind the autonomous cabs. (Neither company commented on Bay Area Current‘s interview.)
Per the worker, Transdev’s hiring process amounts to a kind of Soylent Green approach to human resources, in which dozens of contractors are rounded up sight unseen, onboarded en masse, and then culled from the herd when they inevitably fall behind.
“There’s no interview process,” the worker explained. “They weed people out over time based on whether or not you can keep up with that process and adapt really quickly.”
After that rapid-fire orientation, workers can be assigned to various Waymo facilities all over their home city, with job duties rotating on a daily basis.
“Who gets placed in those specific jobs gets decided by managers the day of,” the robotaxi handler told Bay AreaCurrent. “So your job changes every day depending on how much experience you have, how long you’ve been there, and how friendly you are with the managers.”
Sometimes those roles involve troubleshooting — updating software, cleaning sensors, and uploading Waymo data to company servers. It also includes unsticking Waymos when they clog up traffic, which is becoming a frequent occurrence in San Francisco. That can put workers in a precarious situation in which they have to choose whether to follow company orders not to interfere with a piece of tech still in its infancy.
“The policy for Transdev and Waymo is actually to let [the car] sit there and figure it out, because if we disengage it whenever there’s an issue, then the cars don’t have a chance to figure out the issue itself,” the worker explained. “But when it gets really bad, then we have to — what are you going to do? There’s 50 cars all stuck and people off the street yelling at us and threatening us.”
Other times, handlers can be assigned to cleaning tasks. This becomes especially unpleasant near the end of the week, when weekend revelers leave all kinds of nasty surprises for handlers to mop up.
“Typically that’s when there’s the most throw-up, the most disgusting things in the back,” the handler told Bay AreaCurrent. “Even poop, there’s a lot of cleaning up poop. Way more than you think.”
“One time there were two pig heads in the backseat of the car and the cleaner had to clean it up,” the worker continued. “I assume they just went to the market to make a stew or something, but they forgot their pig heads. They were just rolling around in the back of the car.”
This worker’s arduous experience wrangling Waymos in San Francisco may just a taste of things to come as robotaxis hit the streets across the US.
While American tech billionaires fret over the capabilities of Chinese AI, one national security advisor has a brilliant idea to flatten the competition: simply bomb their data centers to smithereens.
In a new report titled “Superpowers and AGI,” former Obama-era national security official Jacob Stokes calls for United States to begin preparing readiness drills in response to Chinese AI development — up to and including military strikes on the nation’s data centers, the South China Morning Post reported.
AGI, or artificial general intelligence, refers to the theoretical point at which an AI model achieves human, or superhuman, levels of reasoning and intelligence. Though the science is still out on whether such a system is even possible, Stokes’ report begins from the assumption that AGI is inevitable, and that if the US can’t get to it first, its military needs to prepare to take drastic action.
Referring to the US as a hypothetical “laggard state” behind China’s achievement of AGI, Stokes — now the deputy director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, a prominent DC think tank — writes that the country could “try to sabotage the leading state’s AGI systems, either through physical infiltration or offensive cyber operations; that is, cyberattack.”
“Cyberattacks to sabotage AGI might not provoke large-scale retaliation,” Stokes considers, given that “cyberattacks are already to some extent considered normal state behavior below [the] threshold of war.”
But waging an unprecedented cyberwar is just one of many scenarios he outlines. As Stokes observes, AI doesn’t just live online; it also requires immense computing power from physical facilities to run.
“The final option,” therefore, “would be the most dangerous and carry the most escalation risk: kinetic attacks, meaning destroying things with missiles and bombs.”
“Data centers can be bombed with conventional munitions,” Stokes writes. (He’s not the first thinker to suggest bombings to stop powerful AI; in 2023, AI critic Eliezer Yudkowsky suggested that countries needed to be ready to “destroy a rogue data center by airstrike.”)
Of course, the China hawk isn’t numb to what such an attack would mean for the world.
“Bombing would cross a major threshold that heretofore has not been crossed in US-China relations,” Stokes continues. “Trying to think through the particulars of that will be especially important, in part because it will help policymakers… start to work backwards based on the unique nature of the technology, in the same way that in a past era, policymakers would learn about nuclear weapons.”
The difference is that nuclear weapons are physical objects which can be empirically observed. AGI, in contrast, remains a fantasy — albeit one which can evidently justify preparations to make war — not unlike the fiction of weapons of mass destruction which justified the brutal invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003.
And that’s not to mention the fact that China’s approach to AI development is dramatically different than the United States’, which currently leads the world in most large language model (LLM) benchmarks. If anybody is chasing AGI, it’s the US — which surely wouldn’t take kindly to news that Chinese leaders were organizing war games around its own AI development.
Even so, Stokes is undeterred in painting China as the ultimate boogeyman. He warns that Chinese AI companies could make a “surprise technological breakthrough” that brings it closer to AGI, and thus the ability to produce cutting-edge “offensive cyber tools — in other words, cyber weapons.”
Stokes, who previously served as national security advisor to then-vice president Joe Biden as well as the Department of Homeland Security, has long worried about the economic strength of the US relative to its chosen adversaries. Still, his latest comments mark a severe escalation, even for the US national security establishment.
While making a mountain out of a Chinese molehill, Stokes’ report also takes a blind eye to the present-day use of AI by his own country’s military. In Iran, for example, US forces have used LLMs like Claude and Grok to help plan out bombing campaigns — which may have played a role in the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school bombing, which killed over 150 elementary students and staff.
Uber drivers and their passengers across Nigeria and Uganda were shocked on Wednesday when the platform abruptly ceased operations in the middle of the day — and, in some cases, even mid-trip.
According to reporting by the Register, the “Uber rapture,” as it’s come to be known, came with little warning — an email notice sent on the very same day.
“We are writing to share some difficult news,” Uber’s email to Nigerian users went, per a screenshot obtained by the outlet TechCabal. “After a thorough review of our business, we have made the tough decision to wind down our operations in Nigeria, effective 2 September, 2026.”
Of course, the deluge of corporate communiques delivered via email in this day and age means an important memo like this could be easily ignored, if not relegated to the spam folder automatically.
Case in point, the same-day memo did little to prepare drivers or riders for the deactivation, prompting waves of outrage on social media when the Uber app was shut off, seemingly out of nowhere.
“The Uber rapture is wild! Drivers and riders were mid-trip when it happened,” wrote Nigerian journalist Anita Eboigbe in a post on social media. “Insane!”
Another commentator wrote that a “friend of mine said they were on a ride when they got the message. She told the driver and he said ‘it’s a lie!’ The drivers who depend on it for livelihood had absolutely no idea.”
“The app shut down mid-trip,” another account located in Nigeria explained in a comment on X-formerly-Twitter. “They never gave a heads-up or hinted at them leaving the landscape. I had done a delivery that same morning and about an hour later, we all got emails saying they were leaving immediately.”
It’s a dramatic step for Uber, which had been operating in Nigeria since 2014, and Uganda’s capital city of Kampala since 2016.
“This decision is limited strictly to these two markets and does not impact our operations across the rest of the continent,” the rideshare company said in a statement to the Register. “Uber remains deeply committed to sub-Saharan Africa, where we continue to see robust growth and long-term opportunity.”
While most of the vandals ripping down automatic license plate readers prefer to go incognito, an Albuquerque character named Jevon Martinez isn’t afraid to show his face.
Weeks after Bernalillo county officials cancelled their contract with the controversial surveillance company Flock earlier this year, Martinez noticed the automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) were still up. In a series of videos posted on social media and flagged by KOB4, Martinez filmed himself tearing the camera towers down in order to return them to their rightful owners.
“Since [Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Department] is busy — I know BCSO is busy, everyone who works for BCSO, I know you guys are busy, so I went ahead and helped you out,” Martinez says while driving his pickup truck, the bed of which is notably full of ALPR parts.
“We got a bunch of these bad boys,” he says in another video, showing off a truck bed stuffed to the brim with tower parts. “Let’s see how much I can get in one day. That’s gonna be the challenge for everyone out there.”
Playing the helpful citizen, Martinez drove his literal truckload of ALPR bits directly to the Sheriff’s department, where he was promptly taken into custody.
Though he wasn’t armed and hadn’t committed any violent offense, officers made a dramatic show of force as they arrested him. Clad with ballistic-resistant plate carriers, the deputies surrounded Martinez’s truck, drawing their guns and forcing him into cuffs.
“Is this a crime? I don’t think so,” Martinez said in one of his videos. “Neither does the public. I’m just liberating my people from tyranny.”
With so many climate projections and mitigation strategies eyeing far-away years like 2050, it can be tempting to assume there’s still time to reverse the worst impacts of an ever-warming planet.
Unfortunately, that’s no longer in the cards — at least according to the United Nations Environment Programme, which just released a dismal report calling for the “world to face the inevitability of exceeding global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius” above pre-industrial levels.
That’s significant, because the 1.5 degree threshold has long been associated with a range of grim climate tipping points at which the planet will experience irreversible consequences such as the “breakdowns of major ocean circulation systems, abrupt thawing of boreal permafrost, and collapse of tropical coral reef systems,” per a UN climate explainer.
The new UN paper, coming on the heels of the hottest summer on record and pessimistically titled “Limiting Overshoot,” identifies the consequences of this reality, and recommends some immediate actions to keep things from spiraling even further.
Though most scientists agree we’re hovering around the 1.4 degree point at the moment, the UN notes that even in the best case scenario, where “all climate commitments and policies are implemented, warming is projected to reach 1.8 degrees Celsius at a minimum.” If we follow our current track, however, the report highlights the distinct possibility of hitting 2.6 degrees by the year 2100.
That catastrophic future is far from certain, although drastic intervention is becoming increasingly urgent if we hope to stave it off. Underscoring the severity of the present moment, the UN frames the situation in terms of maintaining warming at the 1.5 degree mark — no longer a theoretical ceiling, but the new floor going forward. Doing so, the report authors write, depends “on achieving sustained net-negative CO2 emissions at global scale in the second half of this century, and potentially further reductions of non-CO2 emissions.”
“Decisions taken this decade will determine whether viable options remain to gradually reverse warming back to 1.5 degrees Celsius,” they explain.
Speaking to CBCNews, UN Environment Programme executive director Inger Andersen said “let’s be very clear, 1.5 target is still the goal.”
“But now we need to approach it differently from above,” Andersen explained. “Every tenth of a degree we avoid still means less damage.”
Around the world, the demand for cleaner alternatives to petroleum-based jet fuel is rising.
By 2030, the European Union will require a minimum sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) blend of 6 percent, which will rise to 70 percent by 2050. Countries like the United Kingdom, Singapore, Japan, and Brazil are instituting similar policies, putting pressure on players in the global energy trade to ease reliance on crude oil.
SAF can come from all kinds of recycled waste byproducts like plant material, animal fat, and used cooking oil — the latter of which has already become a major source for existing SAF supplies. Unfortunately, the flow of extra spent fry oil is already slowing to a trickle as refiners swoop in to secure the gloop.
That’s where Chinese company Niutech comes in. In a new press release, first spotted by Interesting Engineering, Niutech announced a massive contract with an anonymous “global energy major” to build out an “industrial continuous waste plastic pyrolysis production line” capable of churning out 10,000 to 50,000 tons of plastic-derived SAF each year.
That might seem like a lot to unpack, but it’s really pretty simple. Basically, the Chinese firm is announcing the development of a massive supply line that turns plastic garbage into usable jet fuel. It plans to do so using a thermal decomposition process called pyrolysis, in which plastic waste is heated to extraordinary temperatures in an oxygen-free environment.
Though it isn’t new, pyrolysis remains something of a niche for the industrial-grade plastics-recycling space. For this approach to meet the growing need for SAF, it first has to graduate beyond the realm of small eco-startups into a widely-accepted industry standard — which appears to be Niutech’s goal.
Unlike previous SAF initiatives involving plastics, this particular production line will all be under one roof, cutting down on the need for costly shipping and handling. The Niutech refinery is also said to make use of a smorgasbord of plastics like polyethylene, nylon, polypropylene, and ABS, all “without complex pre-treatment such as washing, sorting or drying” — streamlining the complex process of sorting plastic and converting it to refinable oil at this kind of scale.
Should Niutech and its anonymous industry partner succeed in bringing the system online, it would undoubtedly serve as a constant source of plastics-based SAF for the global aviation industry, and as a role model for other refineries to follow.
“Large-scale pyrolysis projects impose stringent requirements on continuous operational capability,” a Niutech spokesperson said in the company’s press release. “Niutech has focused on pyrolysis technology for nearly 40 years and brings mature equipment and extensive project experience. This partnership is another validation of the strength of our industrial continuous technology.”
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.
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.
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