The United States is having something of a national referendum on mass surveillance as of late. Embodied most infamously by video surveillance company Flock Safety, Americans from all walks of life are waging war against the proliferation of the company’s automatic license plate readers (ALPR), which the ACLU warns now number in the tens of thousands.

Plenty of communities are organizing campaigns to out-muscle municipal leaders or their cheerleaders on the local police force, and by-and-large, they’re working. Whether in rural towns or sprawling cities, activists who can mobilize citizens to flood council meetings and hold picket signs are finding success. Perhaps most prominently, the Los Angeles Police Department recently allowed its three-year contract with Flock to expire, citing democratic pushback as a significant pressure point.

There’s also another, less-legal side to the anti-Flock sentiment: a rising tide of vandalism. Not content to wait for local officials to strike down ALPR contracts, concerned citizens are taking matters into their own hands by disabling or cutting down Flock camera towers wherever they’re found. But what started as a collection of separate individuals is now rising to the level of a viral phenomenon, as privacy-minded Redditors take to the web to celebrate those who are fighting back with an outpouring of ironic memes and hype reels.

Ground zero for this community appears to be the subreddit r/FlockSurveillance. The forum hosts some 422,000 “activists,” who flood the channel with over 11,000 contributions per week.

Some of the top posts on the subreddit are memes celebrating Flock vandalism: there are crude Photoshop jobs re-imagining covers of the Berenstain Bears as anti-Flock activists, hand-drawn signs encouraging copper thieves to cash in on Flock innards, and an ALPR-themed redesign of the Gadsden flag, to name a few.

Those who’ve been caught and charged with vandalizing ALPRs become digital folk heroes on the subreddit. When news broke that US Air Force engineer Jeffrey Sovern had been charged in connection to the destruction of 13 Flock devices, redditors flooded the post with praise, sharing links to his legal defense fund and encouraging others to donate. (Sovern’s GoFundMe now stands at over $40,000, compared to around $15,440 in early July.)

“I donated to him because those charges are bulls***,” one redditor replied.

In addition to memes, the subreddit has become a destination for serious discussion around ALPRs and surveillance in general. One developer used the forum as a launch pad for their app FlockHopper, a navigation app that helps travelers avoid ALRPs. Others use it to share important developments relevant to the anti-Flock crowd, to get advice on Freedom of Information Act requests, and to dispel misinformation.

“As entertaining a trend as it is, will a few Redditors knocking a few poles over really make a difference?” one redditor asked the group.

“Even a single grain of rice can tip the scales,” a user replied.

More on Flock: Man Trapped in Dystopian Nightmare Thanks to AI Surveillance Cameras Flagging His Every Move

The post Redditors Are Celebrating the Cutting Down of Flock Surveillance Towers With Based Memes appeared first on Futurism.

These days, corporations aren’t just using AI as an excuse to justify layoffs, but are increasingly turning to their chatbots for advice deciding who to fire.

As Reuters reports, 26 Meta employees filed a lawsuit accusing the company of using an internal AI platform to select targets for the thousands of jobs cut earlier this year. Per the suit, Meta used its AI to cull workers based on opaque productivity metrics and large language model (LLM) token usage, a move which disproportionately targeted people with disabilities, and those who had taken maternity or medical leave — literally adding insult to injury.

The 26 plaintiffs, whose names have been redacted from the suit, include engineers, managers, researchers, and designers, as well as a director who had direct access to the AI platform.

Nearly half of the plaintiffs say that their termination was the result of taking either maternity or parental leave, protected activities which Meta’s AI-integrated human resources platform “Checkpoint” allegedly failed to take into consideration. Others claim to have been targeted after taking medical leave for their own disabilities, bereavement leave, or to care for family members.

In some cases, plaintiffs allege to have been specifically warned by Meta leadership not to take time off. The anonymous director, for example, says he was “discouraged and deterred from taking FMLA [Family and Medical Leave Act] leave that his treating provider had recommended, out of a well-founded and objective concern from a manager that such a leave would be held against him in the [reduction in force].”

In the suit, the director corroborates the claim that Meta’s Checkpoint used protected leaves of absence against workers, arguing that the platform “failed to distinguish employees’ leave from lack of engagement.”

The current complaint seeks to block Meta from laying off the 26 plaintiffs, who will each have to file an independent suit owing to legal agreements with the company, Reuters reports.

In a statement, a Meta spokesperson disputed the basic facts of the case.

“Workforce management and organizational decisions were and are made by ​people, not AI,” the spokesperson told Reuters.

More on Meta: Meta Caught Running Ads for Child Abuse

The post Meta Used Its Own Flawed AI to Pick Which Employees to Lay Off, Lawsuit Claims appeared first on Futurism.

Across the United States, lawmakers are increasingly caught between two competing pressures: the massive investment flowing into the tech industry to build AI data centers, and a growing, bipartisan backlash against those same facilities, not to mention the massive tech corporations funding them.

In New York, governor Kathy Hochul is giving in to the former — at least on paper — by announcing a one-year, state-wide ban on new AI data center construction for facilities with an electrical capacity of 50 megawatts and up.

It’s the first time a US state has imposed such a moratorium, highlighting persistent concerns over the rampant pollution, alarming water usage rates, and rising electricity prices.

Per the City Reporter, the governor has ordered state utility regulators to draft “the strongest standards in the nation for data center development,” in order to guarantee that “when companies succeed because of New York, New Yorkers succeed too.”

While the moratorium prevents new mega-facilities from popping up, the New York Department of Public Service will start plugging away on an environmental impact statement to use for assessing future data centers’ affects on water and air quality, in addition to their consumption of electricity and water.

The timing of the temporary ban could not be more opportune for Democrats. With the 2026 midterm elections fast approaching, Democratic party leaders have been scrambling to regain the confidence of the party’s voting base, which has overwhelmingly embraced progressive, non-establishment Democratic candidates in recent elections.

As Futurism noted back in April, opposition to AI would be a slam dunk with progressive voters and even moderate Republicans — though the party has been slow to capitalize on this opportunity, likely a result of the deep pocketed AI lobby, which has lavished the Democratic party with millions of dollars so-far in 2026.

Notably, Hochul’s ban comes in place of a bill passed by the New York State Senate on June 4 which would ban data centers of 20 megawatts or more for up to a year. In addition to raising the maximum allowable size by 30 megawatts, Hochul’s executive order lacks other provisions included in the Senate bill, like a mandate that data center owners fund local infrastructure programs and submit to third-party audits.

While the governor’s total ban is progressive relative to states like Ohio, the gap between the New York Senate bill and Hochul’s executive order clearly reflects the ongoing schism within the Democratic party. In effect, it signals that Hochul is less gung-ho about regulating the tech industry than her counterparts in the state legislature, putting her in a league more in-line with pro-tech industry Democrats like Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer and California’s Gavin Newsom, and less with party progressives like Vermont’s Bernie Sanders.

More on AI data centers: The Economics of Data Centers Creating Jobs Are So Bad That They Sound Like a Joke

The post New York Becomes First State to Ban AI Data Centers appeared first on Futurism.

The VP of a humanoid robotics company was in for a surprise after finding that a Wired article pointed out something extremely unsettling about the company’s robot fingers.

Last week, Wired published a piece on Norwegian-American startup 1X and its Neo humanoid robot with an otherwise uncontroversial thesis: Though the marketing around Neo is decidedly carnal, its hands are impressive, matching and in some ways exceeding the dexterity of a human’s.

During the latter half of the article, Wired‘s Boone Ashworth noted a distinctly sensual pattern emerging in the company’s marketing materials: “smooth jazz plays in the background of a soft, warmly lit video. The robo digits curl around a wine glass, turn off a light, unzip a jacket, and gently fondle some grapes.”

“Not to kink shame, but this is a strange strategy for selling a robot that can also become a portal for human operators to peer into and interact with the things in your home,” Ashworth wrote, referring to the fact that the Neo will have remote human operators to start.

As reviews go, it’s far from the harshest critique of a robot ever written — and we should know — but 1X vice president of product and design Dar Sleeper still took Ashworth’s comments personally. Responding to the piece on X-formerly-Twitter, Sleeper lashed out at the author, using him as an example to lecture other tech journalists on what not to do.

“I gave Wired the exclusive on our hands launch, and they wrote a really weird article about how we are sexualizing robotics,” Sleeper wrote, displaying a remarkable amount of entitlement right out of the gate. “I felt pretty betrayed because that’s not what they told me they were writing about not is that what I’ve ever been about… but I’ve come to find a lot of dishonesty and malice in the journalism community so I wasn’t surprised.”

Continuing, Sleeper says he sent the following email to the Wired writer: “It was nice talking to you, but I wanted to let you know that I didn’t enjoy your article at all.”

I would like to note that I believe both Financial Times, Forbes & Bloomberg to be incredible institutions. You guys are killing it and I respect your ability to always innovate when things are changing.

— dar (@radbackwards) July 11, 2026

“I understand the need to be inflammatory because that seems to be the only thing that gets clicks these days but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t recognize when something special is in front of you,” Sleeper carried on. “I trusted our PR team in saying we should offer you the exclusive on what is one of the most important technological developments in the history of Mankind and I deeply regret it.”

“Good luck with the rest of your writing career,” he added.

Clearly, 1X had something very different in mind with being featured in Wired, a highly reputable tech publication with decades of history. Sleeper’s comments highlight how the company was hoping to control the narrative.

If anything, the executive’s protest suggests that the “sexualization” of humanoid robots is an ongoing source of frustration for the company.

“This post makes it sound like the entire article is about the robot trying to make love to you,” tech journalist Joshua Topolsky tweeted, referring to Sleeper’s comments. “In fact, it’s roughly two paragraphs commenting on the marketing of the robot and the privacy issues of the Neo’s human control mode, where a person is remotely operating the bot, potentially inside your house and potentially in very private moments.”

“I appreciate that the founder embraces journalism and expected a certain framing, but this post kind of exaggerates a rather positive and mild take on his product into something it’s not,” Topolsky added. “If you want journalists to engage with your work, you must expect them to see things you might have missed. This seems to be one of those cases.”

More on robotics: Korean Workers Vote to Go On Strike, Fearing Robots Could Replace Them

The post Startup Upset After Journalist Points Out How Creepy Its Humanoid Robots’s Hands Are appeared first on Futurism.

Rarely has the Los Angeles Police Department found a police toy it doesn’t love. The third-largest police force in the US has major Palantir contracts in place, uses sketchy apps to track minority communities, and routinely sends drones to spy on peaceful protestors.

So when the LAPD ends a contract with a surveillance company because it thinks the technology is too dangerous, you know there’s a problem.

Over the weekend, the police department announced it was abandoning its contract with Flock Safety, the controversial company blanketing the United States in AI-integrated license plate cameras (ALPRs). Though its three-year contract with Flock is just about up, the LAPD says it won’t renew the partnership, citing residents’ concerns over privacy and civil rights, ABC reported.

“This contract is not being renewed because of serious concerns around civil liberties and civil rights issues, particularly around privacy and the data that is being collected from these cameras,” LAPD’s chief information officer Dean Gialamas told ABC in a statement. “The LAPD had to make a difficult decision, in this case discontinuing using Flock services until we can get those data, privacy, security and sharing concerns ironed out through a contractual relationship.”

The news comes just days after our sister publication The Drive‘s Joel Feder reported how he was suddenly swarmed by armed cops while test driving a Range Rover with his wife in Minnesota. Officers said they had been tracking him for days using Flock’s AI-integrated cameras, which had erroneously tagged his car as stolen.

After the latest Flock contract news broke, 404 Media revealed that a July 10 audit by the LAPD Office of the Inspector General caught the department’s ALPR cameras generating 161 false stolen-vehicle alerts in just two months — each one ending with officers pulling over an innocent driver. Factoring in 337 alerts which “resulted in the recovery of stolen vehicles,” the LAPD’s cameras carry an error rate of 32.3 percent, effectively giving officers a one-in-three chance at pulling an innocent person over.

“During the review period, officers acknowledged 161 alerts as accurate license plate matches; however, subsequent investigations determined the vehicles were not stolen,” the report reads. “In addition to creating an inconvenience for vehicle owners, these inaccuracies can affect individual liberty interests, erode public trust, and potentially create substantial legal and financial liability concerns.”

The OIG report notes that officers are required to “attempt to verify all records prior to conducting an investigative stop,” though it didn’t disclose how many of the 161 wrongful stops were the result of an officer’s failure to do so. Instead, investigators blamed license plate records it says were “not updated in a timely manner,” which “may” lead cops to “act on inaccurate or outdated information, increasing the risk of unnecessary enforcement actions, including vehicle stops and wrongful detentions, or a confrontation with serious consequences.”

As 404 flagged, the LAPD approaches potentially stolen vehicles as “high-risk” stops. For the LAPD, these stops require drastic shows of force, including “calling for back up, air support, and a supervisor and ordering the suspect out of their vehicle,” the report reads.

It doesn’t take a large language model to figure out that this is an incredibly dangerous scenario for Black people in Los Angeles, who account for 19.5 percent of those killed by the LAPD, despite making up only nine percent of the city’s population.

Whatever way you slice it, it seems one of the most notorious police departments in the US has finally met its match.

More on surveillance: Flock Cameras Screw Up, Swarm Innocent Man With Armed Police

The post LAPD Abandons Flock Contract After Making a Horrifying Discovery appeared first on Futurism.

Whenever big data center developers roll into town, their pitch ends up sounding something like this: hand over your land and your resources, throw in a decade of government subsidies, and we’ll give your ailing little burg some jobs, tax revenue, and a shiny new facility to boost the local economy.

Sounds like a no-brainer, right? Not so fast, cowboy.

In theory, more tax revenue means money for schools, roads, and first responders. In practice, states and counties are waving those taxes in order to entice tech companies to set up shop — while existing campuses put major strain on local communities. One analysis found that Georgia, Virginia, and Texas each lose over $1 billion a year to state data center incentives, while at least fourteen states don’t even disclose data center tax breaks in the first place.

The down-stream impacts don’t really materialize either. Researchers at Georgia Tech found that in rural areas, data centers typically employ fewer than 100 permanent workers and are likely to import specialized services from outside the community.

While this can temporarily boost unemployment numbers, any broader, long-term impacts are not guaranteed and are highly dependent on local conditions. As the Georgia Tech researchers explain, “the sweeping job and wage growth often promised during local recruitment efforts is unlikely to arrive on its own.”

But the jobs creation claim is where the pitch really falls apart. In Iowa, the Cedar Rapids Economic Development Center recently disclosed that two ongoing data center projects — one for Google carrying a price tag of at least $576 million and another for Blackstone firm QTS starting at $750 million — are contractually required to create a combined minimum of just 61 permanent jobs.

In other words, for $1.3 billion in combined capital coming into the city, Cedar Rapids is only guaranteed 61 permanent positions, a spend of $21.3 million per job. That’s even worse than the $136 million Ark Data Center going up in Northeastern Ohio, which is projected to create a whopping ten full-time jobs when all is said and done.

And while Cedar Rapids brags that these developments will bring “thousands of construction and trade jobs,” that may not be to the city’s benefit. Not only are data center construction jobs temporary — and therefore highly dependent on the whims of notoriously unreliable data center developers — they’re also putting quite the squeeze on the construction market.

As a recent analysis by the firm Turner & Townsend found, the rush to build so many data centers has created a “two-speed construction market,” where top-dollar AI projects drive up costs for other developments like housing, while sucking up the skilled labor needed in other sectors.

That report found that 87 percent of global construction markets are experiencing shortages of mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP) specialists, while the cost and lead-time of acquiring MEP components rises. That’s great news for MEP contractors, but the trade-off is higher costs for everything else we might want to build.

That’s before we even mention how disastrous data centers are for the environment — making it all the more insulting that taxpayers are forced to foot the bill for the tech industry’s vastly exaggerated promises.

More on data centers: The Pollution Being Churned Out by AI Data Centers Is So Severe That It’s Almost Incomprehensible

The post The Economics of Data Centers Creating Jobs Are So Bad That They Sound Like a Joke appeared first on Futurism.

One of the largest health networks integrating AI into the medical space is facing allegations that its high-tech tools are ruining patients’ lives.

In a new civil suit, former Mayo Clinic research director and AI compliance lead Traci Tamiko Eto alleges that the globally recognized hospital retaliated against her for blowing the whistle on its disastrous implementations of AI health tools.

According to reporting by Minnesota Public Radio, Eto first joined the Mayo Clinic in 2023. After flagging potential privacy problems linked with the hospital’s Mayo Clinic Platform, an AI-integrated data system, Eto says her supervisor ignored her concerns. Instead, she says her boss “insisted” that fixing the issue would “jeopardize the pace on ongoing research projects, which in turn would compromise Mayo’s competitive advantage.”

Eto continued, MPR reports, flagging multiple failures of Mayo Clinic higher-ups to follow federal regulations on review processes of new tech, like MAYA, the clinic’s AI-integrated digital assistant. According to the lawsuit, the team working on MAYA deleted unflattering test results, mischaracterized the tool’s abilities, and made decisions that put data security in jeopardy.

Tucked inside her ten separate whistleblower complaints, MPR notes, is the allegation that the team working on MAYA knew the tool had an error rate as high as 67 percent. Eto alleges that instead of flagging that horrifying number, MAYA staffers tried to hide it.

As a result, Eto says she began to be excluded from executive meetings in early 2025, before being told she was a “poor cultural fit.” She was offered a choice, the lawsuit alleges: either resign, or face alterations to her personnel file “that would render her unemployable at Mayo and would impede her career outside the institution.”

As the major lawsuit moves forward, the threat of career-ending backlash remains.

“When an individual decides that they are willing to file a lawsuit against a public goliath on matters that are hot button issues in our country, she is literally risking her career,” Eto’s attorney, Artur Davis told MPR. “She is risking being attacked professionally. She is risking her reputation, and for her to do that tells you something about her level of confidence that she’s right.”

Mayo was pretty tight-lipped in response to the suit.

“Our research and clinical innovation are conducted in accordance with applicable laws and regulations and we remain steadfast in upholding the trust patients place in us and respecting their privacy,” the organization’s communications director told MPR in a statement. “Mayo Clinic does not comment on pending or active litigation.”

While the suit revolves around Eto’s wrongful termination, it represents a significant referendum on the state of AI tools in the medical space. If a healthcare titan like Mayo Clinic is lying about the efficacy of its AI-integrated tools, what does that mean for the rest of the industry?

“If [people] care about the notion that AI has to be handled in a responsible manner,” Davis said, “with integrity, and there have to be rules and guidelines, this is a case that should matter to you.”

More on AI: Millions of Americans Are Talking to AI Instead of Going to the Doctor, and It’s Giving Them Horrendously Flawed Medical Advice

The post Lawsuit Claims the Mayo Clinic’s Use of AI Is Butchering Patient Care appeared first on Futurism.

The Chinese space age is upon us.

Beyond banner projects like the nation’s very own orbital space station and successful developments like reusable rocket boosters, the People’s Republic is pioneering a host of far-flung space initiatives that are cementing it as a power player in Earth’s orbit and beyond.

Case in point: a Chinese spacecraft is now within mere miles of one of the Earth’s seven mysterious “quasi-moons,” the asteroid known as Kamo’oalewa — making it the first world power to approach the mysterious object.

Launched in May of 2025, the Chinese spacecraft Tianwen-2 is now within 12.5 miles of the asteroid’s surface, Space.com reports, allowing it to return the first clear photo ever taken of Kamo’oalewa.

According to China’s state-run outlet Xinhua, the Tianwen-2 probe spent 400 days traveling to reach the asteroid, which measures just a few dozen feet in diameter. After traveling some 620 million miles, the craft will spend the better part of a year riding side-by-side with the space rock, acquiring data on its composition and structure before attempting to scoop up surface samples via methods like “anchor-and-attach” and “touch-and-go.”

Should it succeed, China will become the third country to successfully pull a sample from an asteroid, and could be the first to do so using the anchor-and-attach method — which is exactly what it sounds like, with the spacecraft securing itself to the quasi-moon before using an ultrasonic drill to bore into it.

Either way, the People’s Republic will certainly win the prize for dexterity. As Cristina Thomas, planetary scientist at Northern Arizona University told the New York Times, “Kamo’oalewa is the smallest object that humans have visited with a spacecraft.”

First identified by a Hawaiian survey telescope back in April of 2016, Kamo’oalewa is one of seven known quasi-moons, objects which circle the Earth but are too far to be considered a capital-M Moon. Though the rock’s exact weight is unknown — no doubt something for Tianwen-2 to figure out — its relatively small size presents a massive challenge for the project’s developers.

For one thing, the rock is rapidly spinning as it sails through the cosmos, rotating once roughly every half hour of Earth time. That makes an already small target window even tighter, and adds an element of precise timing to any sample collection efforts. It also means that the nearly two-ton space probe will have to be extremely gentle in its approach, so as not to knock Kamo’oalewa even slightly off course.

The challenges are numerous, and it’ll take months of careful, calculated moves to secure samples of the strange celestial object. But as recent history has shown us, if any country’s space program is up to the enormous task, it’s China’s.

More on China’s space program: China Launches Synthetic Human Embryos to Space Station

The post Chinese Spacecraft Approaches Mysterious Object Near Earth appeared first on Futurism.

As government agencies go, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has left a lot to be desired, often operating less like a government watchdog and more as an industry partner. There’s fee recovery, for example, which effectively mandates the industry pay its own regulators’ salary, as well as the NRC’s habit of trusting voluntary leak reports from reactor operators, not to mention its history of hiding internal safety data to protect its reputation.

As if those deficiencies weren’t bad enough, president Donald Trump is now stripping what’s left of the commission’s mandate down to the bone. Last week, the NRC proposed a bold amendment to its long-standing nuclear safety principles: deleting a line requiring nuclear plant operators to keep radiation exposure “as low as is reasonably achievable.”

According to the Hill, the NRC justifies the move by saying it will remove “unnecessary ambiguity.” But critics say this rule is the whole reason energy companies bother keeping radiation levels as low as possible in the first place.

“Facility owners felt like… ALARA [as low as reasonably achievable] was forcing them to go well below the allowable radiation limits and spend a lot of money to do that,” director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists Edwin Lyman told the Hill. “This is opening the door for sloppier practices,” Lyman continued, and “worse management.”

It gets worse. Also per the Hill, the NRC likewise announced plans to significantly weaken its approach to the National Environmental Policy Act, a foundational piece of legislation dating back to 1970. On Wednesday, the NRC said it wants to gut draft environmental reviews entirely — which, in practice, means kneecapping the public’s chance to weigh in before a reactor gets the green light.

If that weren’t enough, the commission also wants to wash its hands of its mandate to review basic environmental nuisances like noise, dust, and air pollution associated with nuclear facilities. That’s if they even do a review in the first place, as the proposed changes would exempt certain existing reactors, and even new reactors from regular inspection altogether, the Hill reports.

The proposed changes come just a few months after the US Department of Energy began stripping safety regulations that limited nuclear workers’ exposure to radiation. In effect, these changes allow energy companies to speed up productivity, unlocking higher profits at their workers’ expense.

The timing of it all is hard to overstate: with several new nuclear reactors gearing up for operations throughout the US, it’s clear the Trump administration is doing all it can to fast-track incoming nuclear facilities, consequences be damned.

More on nuclear energy: There’s a Glaring Safety Problem With Nuclear Energy Startups

The post Trump Administration Scrapping Nuclear Energy Rules Requiring Plants to Keep Radiation Levels “As Low as Reasonably Achievable” appeared first on Futurism.

As tech companies go, the surveillance giant Palantir plays it looser than most. Specializing in deadly military targeting software and domestic police technology, Palantir isn’t afraid to lean into the reactionary, dystopian schtick.

That’s not an exaggeration. In a since-deleted post on X-formerly-Twitter, Palantir’s head of “strategic engagement” Eliano Younes shared an AI-generated propaganda video depicting the company logo surrounded by cult imagery, bloody crosses, and the grim reaper.

While the edgy ragebait is part-and-parcel of Palantir’s favored type of marketing material, the video evidently ruffled some feathers, exposing a deep cultural rift within one of the largest military tech firms in the world.

Speaking to the Financial Times, one former staffer explained that the incident caused the company to have an “absolute internal meltdown.”

Per the employee, a debate quickly overtook the company’s internal messaging channels, where workers reportedly expressed their outrage out in the open.

“You had people being like: ‘my customer is a children’s hospital — how am I supposed to explain this to them?'” the staffer recalled.

It’s not the first time the company’s leadership has alienated its rank and file. Earlier this year, Palantir workers registered their disgust with the company’s collaboration with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

After the murder of anti-ICE activists Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, one employee took to Palantir’s message boards to declare that “in my opinion ICE are the bad guys. I am not proud that the company I enjoy so much working for is part of this.”

Politically, it all reads a bit like Mordor’s orcs registering HR complaints about Sauron’s management style. The objection is noted, but you’re still helping the guy conquer Middle Earth; Palantir, after all, is named after a fictional orb in JRR Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” that corrupts anyone foolish enough to peer into it.

More on Palantir: “Televised Nervous Breakdown”: Palantir CEO Suffers a Bit of a Meltdown During Live Interview

The post Palantir Insiders Disgusted by Company’s Leadership appeared first on Futurism.

There’s a hot new phrase bouncing around police departments across the United States: “drone-as-first-responder.”

From small-town Indiana to New York City, cops around the country are embracing autonomous surveillance drones as the latest innovation in policing. While you might hear about the occasional puppy found in the woods with a police drone, those feel-good stories provide excellent cover for their true purposes: gathering intelligence on peaceful protests, surveilling minority communities, and intimidating activists.

Though drone-as-first-responder initiatives may not yet inspire the same knee-jerk opposition as Flock surveillance towers and data centers, fury is clearly growing as a more and more Americans are taking a stand against police drones.

In Minneapolis, residents are speaking out against the city police department’s plan to partner with Skydio, a private defense contractor that primarily manufactures drones for military forces. Concerned citizens packed a City Council meeting to discuss the initiative on Wednesday, filling both the main council hall and a back-up overflow room, CBS reported.

At the meeting, over 40 residents took the mic to explain that they don’t want Skydio drones — or any drones for that matter — in the Twin Cities.

“The deployment of autonomous surveillance drones rests on the presumption that the regular people unto themselves are existential threats,” one speaker exclaimed according to local station Fox9. “But if you accept and normalize that idea that every single person could be an existential threat, then you have already stripped your own residents of any inkling of humanity.”

The speaker continued, highlighting the fact that Minneapolis has a particularly grim history of police violence against Black people. “We need respect for our individuals and shared humanity,” they told city council members, “more relational work on the ground, not remote drones in the air.”

That movement in Minneapolis seems to be growing following weeks of organizing by local activists. Though Minneapolis appears to the be the main battleground for anti-police drone sentiment at the moment, similar concerns have been raised in Syracuse, Detroit, and Los Vegas. At Wednesday’s council meeting, some Twin Cities residents cast local opposition to police drones as one front in the national struggle over civil liberties.

One resident, for example, observed that “every” innovation in police technology is ripe for abuse, a conclusion shared by groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union.

“We watched [federal immigration officers] come in here with drones, we watched ICE come here and violate our constitutional rights,” the resident said. “Every technology given to state and federal law enforcement has been abused.”

More on drones: Wild Video Shows Quadcopter Drone Plucking Man From Raging Floodwaters, Whisking Him to Safety

The post Americans Are Raging About Autonomous Police Drones Swarming the Skies appeared first on Futurism.

So far, the narrative of AI in the workplace has had a consistent victim: the recent college grad, supposedly first on the chopping block as large language models automate the types of low level tasks that traditionally provided an on-ramp to office careers.

New evidence, however, suggests the tech may be impacting a surprisingly different segment of the workforce: those closest to retirement.

In a recent study by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, economics professor Geoffrey Sanzenbacher took a hard look at labor data in order to map AI’s impact on older workers in the United States. Comparing government job data against an AI-exposure index — a data set that tracks the degree to which certain occupations hinge on tasks that AI can do — Sanzenbacher compared the number of workers 55 and older leaving the workforce before and after the release of ChatGPT in 2022.

Though the researcher caveats that the “impact of AI on any workers, let alone those near retirement, remains an open question,” his findings point to an alarming shift. Prior to ChatGPT, older workers in the most AI-exposed jobs — highly-trained knowledge worker gigs like coding and tax preparation — were more likely to work later into their lives compared to those in manual labor.

“The types of jobs exposed to AI used to have a relative advantage with respect to career longevity,” Sanzenbacher explains. “In the post-ChatGPT era, the nearly offsetting bars for ‘not working’ suggest that this advantage has been greatly reduced, with a significant share of the increase due to unemployment.”

Though that general pattern still holds overall, Sanzenbacher observes that after the release of ChatGPT, the share of workers 55 and up leaving white collar work is surging. That’s not necessarily because folks are taking early retirements either; as Sanzenbacher writes, “after the ChatGPT launch… AI-exposed jobs saw relative increases in total transitions out of work and specifically to unemployment (but not out of the labor force).”

Said another way, growing numbers of older white collar workers are being pushed out of the airplane before they’re ready to jump, with little more than a blue Walmart vest as a parachute.

Like similar patterns observed around entry-level labor, this appears to be specifically impacting older white collar workers. Though the number of retirement-age workers leaving manual jobs like painting increased by about 2 percent between 2014 and 2025, that’s just a fraction of the number leaving high-exposed office jobs. For computer programmers, the number of exits rose by over 25 percent in the same period, while accountants and auditors saw a 22 percent increase.

It all points to an important question: if entry-level hiring has slowed to a crawl, and retirement-aged professionals are leaving in droves, how is the average worker supposed to navigate a labor market being squeezed from both ends?

More on AI and labor: Execs Confused and Horrified by the Huge AI Bills After Thinking They Could Replace Workers for Free

The post AI Is Pushing Older Employees Straight Out of the Workforce, New Report Finds appeared first on Futurism.

With each passing day without an AI labor revolution, the tech industry’s pricing scheme for AI is becoming more and more disconnected from reality — so much so that even its biggest clients are starting to revolt.

Speaking during an interview on CNBC‘s “Squawk on the Street” segment earlier this week, CEO of cybersecurity giant Palo Alto Networks Nikesh Arora implored the tech industry to lower the cost of AI.

During the segment, the chief executive argued that the cost to use large language models (LLMs) has to drop by 20 percent by 2027 — and 90 percent by 2028 — for the tech to be useful to enterprises.

“We need to see the pricing for AI come down,” Arora said.

Zooming out, Arora’s pleas for cheaper AI are instructive. For your average CEO, the ostensible value of any AI tool is in its ability to automate human workers and either slash payroll costs or keep them low — hence the trillions of dollars capitalists have poured into the industry.

There’s just one problem: AI, or more specifically, LLMs, can’t seem to make automation happen in an effective way, and some argue they never will. Instead, AI has largely become a tool to discipline labor, to squeeze more work out of every worker and keep margins high.

Unfortunately for the CEOs of the world, the rising cost of AI threatens to disrupt even this less-than-optimal arrangement.

Approaching the issue from the opposite end — though without the drama of a CEO experiencing buyer’s remorse — is tech critic Ed Zitron. In a separate interview with the same CNBC panel, Zitron argued that the AI industry is a “$10 to $30 billion [total addressable market] industry pretending to be a $1 trillion one.”

The critic’s diagnosis is essentially the same: the tech industry’s pricing assumes a level of AI demand and value creation that doesn’t exist. The difference between the two is that Arora needs that to change in order to justify his outrageous AI bill, forcing a confession in line with one of the tech industry’s fiercest critics.

More on AI: Companies That Embraced AI Are Now Rotting Away in a Very Specific Way

The post CEO Pleads With AI Industry to Stop Charging So Much to Replace Human Labor appeared first on Futurism.

A lot of people still seem convinced that AI will replace every job on Earth, despite the fact that the tech still struggle with simple math. As the AI hype wears increasingly thin, that gap between hype and reality is becoming impossible to ignore.

The large language models making up the world’s favorite chatbots might be powerful compared to the predictive text algorithms that came before them, but they’re far from the epoch-defining super intelligence many have assumed is right around the corner.

In one since-deleted thread posted on the Reddit forum r/singularity, an AI aficionado posed what they clearly thought was a brilliant question: “why hasn’t AI text generation massively disrupted books yet, when it’s technically capable?”

“Language and writing are the strongest abilities of LLMs, since they’re LLMs,” the user continued. “And yet, people are still reading human made books. Why is that?”

“Just ask the LLM to write you the sequel to your favorite [H]arry [P]otter novel, and it will,” they enthused.

The answer, as some pointed out in the comments, has to do with LLMs’ lack of an ability to concentrate. As the length of an AI chatbot’s response grows, so too does its inability to keep everything cohesive, a debilitating limitation known as “context rot.” Context rot is why you never see individual AI-generated video clips longer than a few seconds, or full-length books that humans actually want to read.

Books aren’t the only thing tech optimists expected AI to devour. In a separate post on X-formerly-Twitter, OpenAI staffer Ryan Brewer expressed frustration that AI “didn’t create an educational renaissance.”

“Shouldn’t I be able to learn a language in a month?” Brewer asked in a post that quickly earned over 2.1 million views. “What did we get wrong?”

The reality, of course, is that attempts to integrate AI into education have been consistently disastrous. As it turns out, a technology that spits out a confident mixture of fact and fiction without challenging the user to track down or digest information on their own isn’t conducive to particularly effective schooling.

“It’s so f**king depressing that so many people think this is how learning works,” one user quipped.

Another simply shared a screenshot of an AI chatbot’s textbox containing the prompt: “learn for me.”

More on AI: Workplaces Have Gotten So Bizarre That People Are Just Sending AI Slop Back and Forth at Each Other

The post Tech Bros Puzzled by Why AI Hasn’t “Massively Disrupted” Books Yet appeared first on Futurism.

As the World Cup enters its final stages, soccer-themed AI slop is proliferating on X-formerly-Twitter.

Sure, it’s no secret that X has suffered some major brain drain under the Musk regime. But the latest deluge of World Cup drek is so ridiculous, it makes the app’s crypto scammers look like Pulitzer finalists.

First spotted by Out Sports, the deluge of AI engagement bait mostly revolves around semi-erotic scenarios playing out in the grandstand.

In a clip with over 7 million views, one clickfarm account shared an AI-generated clip apparently playing on the distracted boyfriend meme: a woman’s boyfriend looking on jealously as she devours a buff, shirtless Norwegian soccer fan with her eyes.

“And with us, the first divorce case in the World Cup 2026,” the caption reads. The entire thing is AI-generated, but that didn’t stop lower-tier clickbait purveyors from circulating it to all corners of the social media platform.

Beneath the spam is a deluge of commenters taking it at face value, seemingly with no idea it isn’t real.

“She looked at him like a nice, juicy steak,” wrote one dupe. “Back to the hamburger, sweetheart.”

ومعانا اول حاله طلاق في المونديال ٢٠٢٦ pic.twitter.com/jb7bAKmBnv

— NA Na (@NoNa_09x) July 6, 2026

A photo, shared by an account with the eyebrow-raising name “boys love,” shows a French fan and a Swedish fan kissing after Sweden scored a goal during the June 30th knockout match. The only problem is that Sweden never scored — the game ended with France up 3-0. Of course, that didn’t stop over 9,000 people from liking and boosting the AI image anyway.

“This is an example [for] so many of how soccer can bring people together,” one commenter gushed.

Yet another fan posted a four-photo collage of well-endowed world cup fans, at least a few of whom seem to be the result of generative AI. “The women of the World Cup,” the poster enthused. “Boobs are bringing men together all around the world.”

Below, a user responded: “AI is melting your brain bro.”

More on X: Elon Musk Absolutely Obsessed With Tweets From Random Guy In India Who Constantly Glazes Him, Analysis Shows

The post People on X Are Getting Fooled by the Dumbest AI Slop We’ve Ever Seen appeared first on Futurism.

If you drive, your car’s tires are shredding more than just tread: they may be mincing up our grey matter too.

New research by a team in China discovered an alarming link between a chemical commonly found in tires and the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. The chemical, called 6PPD-Q, is formed when fine tire particles meet ozone. That happens anytime new chunks of tire are exposed to the air, meaning the particle may be nearly ubiquitous in car-heavy environments.

According to the findings, recently published in the journal Open Medicine, when the ozone-treated chemical meets our brain cells, it can cause oxidative stress — wear and tear, basically — and inflammation, while also reducing how effectively individual cells “communicate” with one another. These factors strongly correlate to the development of early-stage Alzheimer’s, suggesting anyone who regularly comes into contact with rubber tires may be inadvertently exposing themselves to brain-altering chemicals.

For those in car-dependent regions of the world like North America, that’s a pretty significant chunk of the population.

The chemical makes its way into our brains through our blood, which it enters primarily when we breathe in dust particles laden with 6PPD-Q. Other avenues of exposure include crops and soil, stadium turf, working near highways or with cars, and contact with recycled tire products.

While scientists already knew that 6PPD-Q interacts with the brain somehow, the chemical’s newfound molecular connection to Alzheimer’s is significant. Using machine learning software, the team mapped how effectively the chemical binds to five “Alzheimer predictor genes,” finding that 6PPD-Q forms strong bonds with three.

Beyond humans, 6PPD-Q run-off from roadways is having a sizable impact on fish populations, notably salmon. One 2022 study on the environmental journey road runoff takes described the substance as a “highly toxic tire-derived chemical,” which has caused “mass mortalities of coho salmon,” specifically.

Going forward, scientists still need to conduct broader lab tests on human cells in order to figure out how severely various quantities of 6PPD-Q contribute to Alzheimer’s disease. Only then can we get a sense of just how risky it is to burn rubber.

More on pollution: Amazon Is Spewing a Record Breaking Amount of Pollution to Power Its AI Data Centers

The post Learning What Substance Is Suspected of Causing Alzheimer’s May Throw You Into an Existential Crisis appeared first on Futurism.

The United States is in the grips of one of the most drastic reversals of green energy infrastructure currently underway on our increasingly warm world. It probably comes as little surprise, then, that the Land of the Free was one of the key drivers of global emissions in 2025.

According to a new statistical review by the Energy Institute, a London-based non-profit, energy supplies are skyrocketing — and as they do, so are emissions.

North America made up 47 percent of the world’s total emissions increase across 2025, led by the US. Much of that was fueled by outsize demand for data centers: as OilPrice.com analyst Robert Rapier notes, the US accounted for 40 percent of global data center electricity consumption, indicative of the impact the country’s AI boom is having on global emissions overall.

Though the US also added some renewable energy — solar capacity alone grew by over 28 percent compared to the previous year — that doesn’t automatically mean dirty, non-renewable energy shrank. As Rapier observes, much of North America’s emissions growth was led specifically by the rising coal-based emissions in the US, which grew by 13 percent.

“Many people assume that if solar and wind are growing quickly, fossil fuels must be shrinking,” Rapier writes. “That is not what the data show. In a growing energy system, both can happen at once. Renewables can rise sharply, while fossil fuel use also rises.”

Part of this is the fact that renewable energy has not grown fast enough to offset other energy sources.

As Rapier obverses, “solar certainly has not failed. But clean energy growth has to be large enough to meet new demand while also displacing existing fossil fuel consumption. In 2025, that did not happen.”

More on climate change: Scientists Horrified by Record-Breaking Ocean Temperatures

The post You’ll Never Guess Which Country Is Causing the Most Global Warming appeared first on Futurism.

This content is for members only. Visit the site and log in/register to read.