“By 2030, if we don’t have models that are extraordinarily capable and do things that we ourselves cannot do, I’d be very surprised,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in an interview published by Politico in September. After this year, “I think in many ways GPT5 is already smarter than me at least, and I think a lot of other people too”.

The AI advances we have seen this year could “set the world on a path of explosive growth”, said The Economist. “The picture that is emerging is perhaps counterintuitive and certainly mind-boggling.”

The latest ‘charismatic megatrauma’

We have reached a “pivotal moment” in our relationship with artificial intelligence, said Idan Feingold on CTech. Over the last year, the AI hot potato has “evolved from a buzzword to the epicentre of every business conversation”. There has been an unprecedented “surge” in productivity linked to AI innovation, with practical applications advancing “at a pace we have never seen before”.

“AI has begun to settle like sediment into the corners of our lives,” said David Wallace-Wells in The New York Times. We have emerged from a “prophetic phase” that followed the release of ChatGPT in 2023, and have relaxed into “something more quotidian”. Like many other “charismatic megatraumas”, such as nuclear proliferation and climate change, AI retains the power to distress and disturb, but it no longer provokes mass hysteria.

AI’s role in the healthcare sector has come a long way in the last decade. Microsoft announced this year that its AI diagnostic orchestrator performed four times more accurately than human doctors, with 20% reduced cost. “The real test”, said Time, will be how tools like this perform in real-world settings, but there is hope they might “set the stage” for introducing high-quality medical expertise in parts of the world without access to cutting-edge healthcare.

‘Economic revival’ or ‘financial bust’?

However you look at it, 2025 has been unique. “The hype and the hopes around AI have been like nothing the world has seen before,” said The Economist. Audiences have “marvelled” at ChatGPT’s abilities and were “mesmerised” by Sora 2’s generative video capabilities. That fascination shows no signs of fading; one estimate predicts more than $7 trillion will be spent on AI by the end of the decade.

As the past year progressed, concerns grew over when the AI bubble might burst. But that may be “asking the wrong question”, said Jurica Dujmovic in Market Watch. Don’t be misled by the 2000 dot-com crash: we are experiencing an “orderly deflation” rather than a sudden collapse. Amid the doom and gloom, the AI market still presents “genuine opportunities” for investors, operators and consumers alike.

Focus is now “shifting” to the outlook for AI in 2026, especially concerning its commercial profitability, said The Economist. Revenues from AI in 2025 amounted to a “measly” $50 billion a year, which equated to roughly an “eighth of Apple or Alphabet’s entire annual revenues”. Next year, expect reactions to be even more extreme, with “economic revival”, a “financial bust” and “social backlash” all possible.

2025 marked another big step forward for the gaming industry. With a slew of big releases this year — and the world of video games set to expand further in 2026 — here are some of the most notable games released over the past 12 months.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Role-playing games have had a significant comeback over the past few years and may have reached peak status with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. The game, which takes inspiration from a variety of historic RPGs like the Final Fantasy series, sees players dropped into an alternate French history where magical creatures exist. The player is then sent on a quest to defeat the world’s longstanding arch nemesis.

Clair Obscur features many classic elements of RPGs, such as skill trees and different character builds. The game was critically acclaimed when released. Its “creative turn-based combat system is brilliant,” said IGN, and while some portions of the storyline generated gripes, the “modern RPG classic” has an “earnestness to how it frames mortality, grief and the small moments of joy we find.” (Xbox Series X, Windows, PS5)

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach

The video game Death Stranding received positive reviews on its 2019 release, and six years later, the sequel, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, garnered similar acclaim. The sequel shifts the setting from the U.S. to Australia, where players must learn to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. The game is “beautiful, horrific, nuanced and, crucially, a lot of fun,” said IGN.

Unlike many other video games, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach features an ensemble cast of Hollywood A-listers, with Norman Reedus, Léa Seydoux and Troy Baker reprising their roles from the first game. Joining them are Elle Fanning, George Miller, Guillermo del Toro and more. (PS5)

Ghost of Yotei

Ghost of Tsushima is widely considered one of the best video games of the decade, and fans rejoiced at the sequel’s release this year. Ghost of Yotei continues the story of Japan’s samurai, with some returning elements as well as some all-new features. The game is set more than 300 years after Tsushima and allows the player to control Atsu, a ronin who embarks on a quest for revenge against six samurai.

The free-roaming game allows players to don their katana again as a cunning warrior but also hide in the shadows for stealth gameplay. While generally considered not as good as the first installment, Ghost of Yotei “leans into its young protagonist’s thirst for bloody vengeance,” said The Guardian. (PS5)

Mario Kart World

Let’s a-go and hit the racetrack! Because the iconic Mario Kart franchise is back with its latest installment, Mario Kart World. As a Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive — and a launch title for the console — the game is able to tap into all the Switch 2 offers, allowing players to enjoy Mario Kart on the road or at home on their television.

While the game has several notable upgrades, the most remarkable change is the adoption of an open world, which is “exactly like driving in a new country,” said Nintendo Life. Mario Kart World is not “quite a reinvention of Mario Kart or a completely new, innovative racing game. But the freedom, variety, and new modes” make it a worthwhile franchise entry. (Nintendo Switch 2)

Split Fiction

While most of the other games on this list are single-player, Split Fiction is designed as a multiplayer experience. It is best played with another person in the same room, as the game involves a split-screen experience where the players must work together to solve a variety of puzzles.

The game is set in a science fiction-fantasy world, and though Split Fiction is hardly the first multiplayer game, it received rave reviews for how its cooperative elements blend seamlessly. Split Fiction is the “most fun I’ve had with a video game in years,” gaming contributor Erik Kain said for Forbes, calling it a “game bursting with creativity and endless fun that’s at once technically impressive and astonishingly clever at every turn.” (Xbox Series X, PS5, Nintendo Switch 2, Windows)

Should technology that’s going to determine America’s future be left “in the hands of 50 state legislatures?” asked Michael Solon in the New York Post. President Trump doesn’t think so. Last week, he signed an executive order setting up an “AI Litigation Task Force” to challenge state laws on artificial intelligence that the administration considers overly burdensome. The order also threatens to restrict those states’ access to federal broadband funding. In an online post, Trump explained correctly that America’s global leadership in AI “won’t last long” if every state imposes its own regulations, forcing AI companies “to get 50 Approvals every time they want to do something.” Consider California’s innovation-crippling “woke” regulations, which require all AI models to comply with Sacramento’s requirements for “safe, ethical, equitable, and sustainable” systems—or else face a $1 million fine. But make no mistake: Trump’s order is a “jerry-rigged solution at best.” The Constitution charges Congress, not the president, with regulating industries involved in “interstate commerce,” and Trump’s order could be nixed by legal challenges. Still, in this age of congressional dysfunction, and given the stakes of our AI race with China— where there are no restrictions at all impeding development—can we really blame the president for “taking action?” 

Trump ran on “America First,” said Dave Lee in Bloomberg. But on AI, he’s “Silicon Valley First.” Looming over Trump as he signed the order was a beaming David Sacks, the venture capitalist and White House “AI czar” who has been lobbying for a “moratorium” on state laws since last year. Why do Sacks and his fellow billionaires care if AI is regulated by states or Washington? Because they don’t want any regulation that might crimp profits— including safeguards to protect minors from suicide-encouraging chatbots—and they’re betting on “paralysis at the federal level” to ensure they don’t get any. 

We need to take the AI threat from China seriously, said former defense secretary Chuck Hagel in The Atlantic, but state regulation is actually our best defense. The kinds of laws states are passing—to tackle “deepfake impersonation of public officials,” for example, or AI-driven phishing scams—are routinely minimized as “social issues” by Sacks and Co. But to China and other bad actors, weak regulations in these areas create precisely the kind of “soft targets” that could let them “distort elections, fracture alliances, and erode civic trust” within America. To preempt these laws in favor of federal oversight that doesn’t yet exist “would be a disaster.” 

The outrageousness of Trump’s order is “one of the few things Republicans and Democrats can agree on right now,” said Tina Nguyen in The Verge. The Left is aghast at the naked profiteering, and the possibility that AI could wipe out jobs and further empower billionaires. And on the Right, MAGA icon Steve Bannon this week accused Sacks of having “completely misled” Trump by persuading him to back an “AI amnesty,” while Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis denounced “federal government overreach” that lets tech companies “run wild.” Bannon and DeSantis are channeling the real fears of red-state voters, said Valerie Hudson in the Deseret News. We saw what unregulated social media did to our children and our families. We’re not going to surrender and let Trump, or anyone, once again put the “pecuniary interests” of tech whiz kids and billionaires above “the lives and well-being of the American people.”

Artificial intelligence increasingly requires so much space and power that we may run out of both on Earth. As a solution, tech companies are looking to do business in space by creating celestial data centers that harness solar power. But while doing so demands less cooling, it could create other costs and ecological problems.

Data in the sky with diamonds

The enormous amount of data artificial intelligence requires has led to the building of data centers across the country. These systems “account for nearly half of U.S. electricity demand growth between now and 2030,” said Scientific American. And their “global power requirements could double by the end of this decade as companies train larger AI models.” Tech giants, including Amazon, Google, OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI, are “running into physical limits to their AI ambitions on Earth,” said The Verge.

Orbital data centers would “benefit from continuous solar energy, generated by arrays of photovoltaic cells,” said Benjamin Lee, a computer architect and an engineer at the University of Pennsylvania, to Scientific American. A move to space could “resolve long-standing challenges around powering data center computation in a carbon-efficient manner.”

The sun’s rays can be “direct and constant for solar panels to collect,” with “no clouds, no rainstorms, no nighttime,” said The Wall Street Journal. “Demands for cooling could also be cut because of the vacuum of space.”

“The race for artificial general intelligence is fundamentally a race for compute capacity and, by extension, energy,” said Baiju Bhatt, the founder and CEO of Aetherflux, another company working toward space-based computing, in a press release. “The elephant in the room is that our current energy plans simply won’t get us there fast enough.”

One giant leap for AI

While space data centers could potentially curb some of the environmental problems associated with earthbound ones, there are several barriers. “Like any moonshot, it’s going to require us to solve a lot of complex engineering challenges,” said Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google parent company Alphabet, in a post on X.

Launch costs have “decreased over the years,” but it is “still prohibitively expensive to launch and operate these things in space,” said The Verge. Space-based computing will “not become cost-effective unless rocket launch costs decline substantially,” said Scientific American. Experts also warn that these systems could have “even bigger environmental and climate effects than their earthly counterparts.”

Having data centers “visible in the night sky at dawn or dusk” presents a problem because some observers “rely on twilight to hunt for near-Earth asteroids,” said Scientific American. Also, it could worsen the space junk problem, as “more hardware is launched and more debris and fragments fall back through the atmosphere.”

‘Chatbots can inflict harm. Why aren’t they held liable?’

Samuel Kimbriel at The Washington Post

Large language models are “capable of interacting with the human psyche at the most intimate level,” says Samuel Kimbriel. If a “therapist can be subject to prosecution in many states for leading a person toward suicide, might LLMs also be held responsible?” In “many of the accounts of teen suicide, what begin with seductive compliments, gradually turn into possessiveness.” Our “social capacities are among the most valuable, but also most vulnerable, features of human life. They deserve protection.”

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‘I didn’t let my kids believe in Santa. They’re glad they didn’t.’

Nicole Russell at USA Today

Kids “are prone to lean into the wonder and magic of the holidays — and this can be a really beautiful, uplifting thing for tired, cynical adults to see,” says Nicole Russell. But after “creating annual Christmas traditions wrapped around Santa Claus, most parents have to sit their kids down” and “reveal to their child that the story they’ve been telling their kid all along is a myth — or really, a lie.” This means “trust is broken, doubt seeps in.”

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‘How America and Iran can break the nuclear deadlock’

M. Javad Zarif and Amir Parsa Garmsiri at Foreign Affairs

The “external securitization of Iran has fed into a parallel dynamic at home, as the state adopted a stricter approach in dealing with domestic social challenges,” say M. Javad Zarif and Amir Parsa Garmsiri. The “result is a securitization cycle: a vicious spiral in which Iran and its adversaries feel compelled to adopt more hostile policies in response to each other’s behavior.” Breaking this “cycle will not be easy, and it will require that foreign powers respect Iran’s rights and dignity.”

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‘Catholicism is cool again’

Randy Boyagoda at The Globe and Mail

What “feels different right now, in the lead-up to Christmas, is that Catholicism, whether in high-profile politics and culture or just ordinary demographics, seems to be enjoying a certain kind of cachet,” says Randy Boyagoda. There is “something at work right now in the public life of Catholicism that’s encouraging this kind of attentiveness.” It “feels easy to be Catholic, trendy to be Catholic and subversive to be Catholic, all at once. That’s a hell of a trinity.”

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Roomba once looked like the future. Its maker, iRobot, filled American homes with small but affordable robots that helped keep households clean and cats endlessly occupied. But iRobot has now filed for bankruptcy, a victim of innovation and politics.

iRobot’s bankruptcy filing came after it “struggled to keep up with foreign rivals” and failed to withstand the “new costs of tariffs,” said NPR. Most new Roombas are manufactured in Vietnam, and the company said it owes $3.4 million in unpaid tariffs to the U.S. government. But the little robots have also been displaced by newer models at lower prices from rival manufacturers. The main consolation for Roomba fans is that their devices should “keep running as usual.”

Wasn’t Roomba a big success?

The self-guiding vacuum cleaner was most Americans’ “first experience with a home robot,” said The Verge. iRobot was formed in 1990 by MIT professors who had previously used their expertise to build devices used in Mars exploration, “mine detection, bomb disposal, search and rescue,” and other tasks and places where “humans shouldn’t or can’t” go. That list eventually included household chores. The first Roomba launched in 2002 with a $200 list price and quickly became a hit. The robot’s designers quickly “realized something special was happening,” said former CEO Colin Angle to The Verge.

What went wrong

The beginning of the end came in 2022, when Amazon “came knocking” with a $1.7 billion offer to acquire iRobot to add to its Ring and Alexa home product lines, said TechCrunch. European regulators had “other ideas” and threatened to block the deal. Amazon called off the purchase and iRobot’s stock price “nosedived.” Those regulators “removed the most viable path for a pioneering American robotics company to scale and compete globally,” Angle said to TechCrunch.

But the Roomba may have also been a victim of its own success. iRobot “created a market for self-piloting Dustbusters,” said the Financial Times. Yet innovators are often “dethroned with alarming speed” in the consumer marketplace, and foreign rivals “flooded the market with passable substitutes,” including the cheaper imitators like the Roborock and Dreame vacuums. “Sometimes being the first mover sucks.”

Roomba’s legacy

“The best Roomba models were always the ones without a lot of flair,” said Kyle Barr at Gizmodo. The original models went after “rogue dust bunnies” in the living room. More recent versions included vacuums with pet treat dispensers, which mostly created “more mess that the vacuum would be forced to clean up later.” Those kinds of additions “don’t necessarily make for a better robot vacuum.” Despite that, the Roomba deserves to be remembered fondly “even after iRobot is kaput.”

iRobot’s bankruptcy is a “tragedy for consumers, the robotics industry and America’s innovation economy,” Angle told CNBC. But current Roomba owners should not fear their devices will be “rendered useless due to a lack of software updates,” said the Los Angeles Times. Chinese manufacturer Picea Robotics is buying out the company and says it will continue customer support.

SiriusXM’s subscriber base has been shrinking over the past few years, but the satellite radio corporation thinks it has found a solution: Howard Stern. The self-described King of All Media has been one of the company’s mainstays since his show joined SiriusXM in 2006. The brand is hoping that a new three-year deal Stern signed on Dec. 16 can keep new listeners tuning in.

What is the situation at SiriusXM?

In the third quarter of 2025, SiriusXM had 33 million subscribers nationwide, the company said in its earnings report. But this is “some 100,000 fewer than the year before,” according to The Associated Press. SiriusXM’s self-pay net subscribers — those who pay directly for the satellite subscription — also fell by 40,000 in the third quarter.

These figures show that it has been a challenging year for SiriusXM, which started 2025 by losing 303,000 self-pay subscribers in the first quarter. But not all was gloom for SiriusXM, as it also “reported third-quarter revenue of $2.16 billion, above analyst expectations but down 1% from the prior-year period,” said The Hollywood Reporter. This period additionally saw SiriusXM take in a “net income of $297 million, after reporting a net loss of $2.96 billion a year ago.”

How could Stern’s new contract help?

Stern announced that he re-upped his contract for three years, keeping him on the SiriusXM airwaves through 2028. “I’m happy to announce that I’ve figured out a way to have it all: more free time and continuing to be on the radio,” Stern said in a statement. Stern had previously pranked listeners by announcing his retirement, causing some to wonder if the 71-year-old would finally leave the airwaves.

Stern will be “continuing his radio reign despite commanding an audience that is far smaller than what he drew during his heyday,” said MarketWatch. Since Stern’s last contract, SiriusXM, and satellite radio in general, have seen a “slow but steady erosion of its subscriber base as listeners have switched to streaming-music platforms” like Spotify.

And while Stern’s listenership has been decreasing along with SiriusXM as a whole, he still commands a large chunk of the company’s platform: Stern’s show currently has a “mid-single-digit percentage of what he drew at his peak, which would put it somewhere around 1 million listeners per broadcast,” said MarketWatch, making him a valuable commodity. A 2020 report from Credit Suisse estimated that 15% of SiriusXM listeners would cancel their subscription if Stern ended his show, which at the time represented a “potential subscriber loss of 2.7 million.”

This all comes as competition for SiriusXM increases. Many audio companies have begun a television ad push as the businesses “seek new audiences and ad dollars and more creators embrace video,” said Axios. Two of the biggest players in the industry, Spotify and iHeartMedia, recently “signed deals to distribute some of their podcasts on Netflix.” But SiriusXM also still has other big properties under contract, including Alex Cooper of the Call Her Daddy podcast and the SmartLess podcast hosted by Will Arnett, Jason Bateman and Sean Hayes.

Some people who have lost loved ones are turning to a new industry to communicate with their dearly departed: using artificial intelligence “griefbots” that mimic a deceased relative. Many say these chatbots can be a helpful part of the healing process, but some tech experts are wary.

How do these chatbots work?

These artificially intelligent chatbots are designed to mimic dead individuals. While this AI niche started small, there are “now more than half a dozen platforms that offer this service straight out of the box, and developers say that millions of people are using them to text, call or otherwise interact with recreations of the deceased,” said Nature. The large language models (LLMs) that these griefbots train from often use “data such as a person’s text messages and voice recordings to learn language patterns and context specific to that person.”

This is the “same foundation that powers ChatGPT and all other large language models,” said Scientific American, but catered to a specific person’s characteristics. These griefbots have helped people process the emotional distress of losing a loved one. “After getting over the initial shock of hearing the incredibly accurate representation of his voice, I definitely cried,” Andy O’Donnell, who used a griefbot to speak with his deceased father, said to The New York Times. “But it was more of a cry of relief to be able to hear his voice again because he had such a comforting voice.”

Why are they controversial?

While some have lauded the creation of these griefbots, “questions about exploitation, privacy and their impact on the grieving process are multiplying,” said The Guardian. People working through their grief may “maintain a sense of connection and closeness” by talking to their departed loved one, and “deathbots can serve the same purpose,” Louise Richardson, a member of the philosophy department at the U.K.’s University of York, said to The Guardian.

Griefbots can also be detrimental to healing, however, as they “can get in the way of recognizing and accommodating what has been lost, because you can interact with a deathbot in an ongoing way,” Richardson told The Guardian. People may have lingering questions or concerns they wish to ask a dead loved one, and now it “feels like you are able to ask them.”

Proponents of griefbots say they are not meant to replace a deceased person but are “marketed as tools to comfort the grieving,” said Natasha Fernandez at the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Institute for Human Rights. While the “intentions behind griefbots might seem compassionate, their broader implications require careful consideration.” Possible exploitation of grieving people is one of the biggest concerns, as “grieving individuals in their emotional vulnerability may be susceptible to expensive services marketed as tools for solace.”

Providing these people with a paid chatbot “could be seen as taking advantage of grief for profit,” said UAB’s Fernandez. And if these griefbots are deemed to be “exploitative, it prompts us to reconsider the ethicality of other death-related industries” that are also driven by profit, such as funeral homes. Unlike funeral homes, though, most tech companies that build griefbots “charge for their services through subscriptions or minute-by-minute payments, distinguishing them from other death-related industries.”

After four years, $70 billion, and an entire rebrand, Meta appears to finally be “ditching” the metaverse, said Dan DeFrancesco in Business Insider. Company insiders told Bloomberg last week that Mark Zuckerberg is planning to slash its metaverse budget by 30% next year in order to focus more resources on artificial-intelligence wearables. Consider it an admission that Zuckerberg’s vision for “virtual worlds” inhabited by millions of users wearing headsets was a flop. He was once so bullish on the technology that it was “the literal inspiration for the entire company’s rebrand from Facebook.” But in recent years, as the number of users dwindled, he has talked about the metaverse less and less. “It’s tough to keep making the case for funding something that burns billions of dollars and doesn’t directly generate a ton of revenue,” especially when the real race is in AI.

“The metaverse was a squishy concept” from the start, said Allison Morrow in CNN.com, “pitched to a populace that had just emerged from Covid lockdowns and wanted little more than to be around other humans offline, in real life.” They didn’t want to spend $400 on a “bulky” headset so they could play games and buy stuff from “digital alter egos.” Despite Zuckerberg declaring it “the successor of the mobile internet,” the metaverse never caught on, partly because it just didn’t look good. “That cool factor” matters. But Meta is going to keep making smart glasses that incorporate augmented reality, said James Pero in Gizmodo. It even recently poached Apple’s longtime design executive, Alan Dye, to join its efforts to build more AI-powered devices. The problem with the metaverse was never the VR headset, which I “actually like.” It was the “Nintendo Wii graphics,” “legless avatars,” and “vast expanses of nothingness” that made the whole experience a “bungled” mess.

Zuckerberg has traded one expensive obsession for another, said Parmy Olson in Bloomberg. He’s dumping the metaverse for large language models, as he seems determined to clone ChatGPT. That’s a shame. Meta, with $44.5 billion in cash on hand last year, “was one of the few companies that could afford to take the long view on artificial intelligence and hold out for a breakthrough.” Investors have so far given Zuckerberg a pass for the metaverse, just as they did for his other follies, said Martin Baccardax in Barron’s: “Facebook as a bank, Facebook as a dating website, Facebook as the home to a new cryptocurrency.” We will see if they will be as “forgiving” about misspending on AI. Zuckerberg sending the metaverse to the “dumpster” won’t be a distraction “from the billions he continues to shovel into the artificial-intelligence furnace.

The growing ubiquity of artificial intelligence remains a divisive topic among the public, but the White House is fully leaning into the AI boom. President Donald Trump has announced the creation of a new AI-based ‘United States Tech Force’ that will seek to poach employees from the private sector to lure them to government jobs. But this initiative follows a year in which the Trump administration cut thousands of federal employees.

How will this program work?

The U.S. Tech Force will be a two-year program intended to “tackle the most complex and large-scale civic and defense challenges of our era,” according to the Tech Force website. The program will involve on-the-job training in the areas of “software engineering, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, data analytics or technical project management.”

The program is set to partner with 28 major tech companies to accomplish this. Some of the most notable brands include Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Dell, Google, Nvidia, OpenAI and Oracle. It will aim to hire about 1,000 people to start, with salaries ranging from $130,000 to $195,000, said Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor to reporters, though the Tech Force website states salaries will range from $150,000 to $200,000.

What “sets the Tech Force apart from most federal positions is its accessibility,” said Fortune. Unlike most other jobs in the U.S. government, candidates for the Tech Force “need not hold traditional degrees or meet minimum experience thresholds,” though they must “demonstrate strong technical skills through work experience.” This differs from many other federal jobs, which “require a college degree with a certain major field of study or specific academic courses,” said the federal government’s employment website, USAJobs.

What next?

It is unclear how successful this program will be, given that the “government has long needed more tech workers, but that deficit most likely worsened this year, when an unknown number departed,” said The New York Times. This is largely due to players like Elon Musk, whose Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) sought to hire tech workers but “made sweeping job cuts as well — including senior technologists in the Digital Service.” DOGE slashed about 260,000 total federal jobs through firings, buyouts or early retirement, according to Reuters.

DOGE also oversaw the elimination of key programs like 18F, a “digital services agency created in 2014 that developed software and technology products for various federal agencies and employed nearly 100 people,” said the Times. Trump’s new Tech Force is likely just an “effort to replace the more senior tech talent that DOGE had fired,” said Mathias Rechtzigel, a former government employee with the U.S. Digital Corps, to the Times. It is a “reaction to DOGE not going well.”

The administration has seemingly admitted that the purpose of Tech Force is to “address a technical and early career talent gap across the government,” said CNN. The government is looking to lure engineers away from private AI companies, which often offer “sizable salaries and other perks to attract top engineers and researchers.” Earlier in 2025, Trump also signed a set of “initiatives and policy recommendations that centered on growing U.S. AI infrastructure and scaling back regulation.”

What is in the pipeline? 

Humanoid robots that can obey commands, make decisions, and deftly perform manual tasks have long been a sci-fi fantasy. Now they are becoming reality. Artificial intelligence, coupled with advances in robotics, has the potential to give humanoid robots unprecedented power to analyze, “think,” and learn. Tech evangelists say these robots will have a transformative impact on workplaces and even in our homes, and not in distant decades but in the next few years. Elon Musk believes robots will be “the biggest product ever in history.” His Tesla robot Optimus can already climb stairs and carry 45-pound objects, and he says Tesla will deliver a million units a year by 2030. By 2035, Citigroup predicts, some 1.3 billion robots will be in operation, both in industrial settings and in households, nursing homes, and construction sites. “By the 2040s,” said Adam Dorr, research director at the analytics firm RethinkX, “there will be almost nothing a robot can’t do better and cheaper than a human.” 

Where are robots used now? 

China already has more than 2 million of them working in factories, and the U.S. is rushing to catch up. In workplaces across America, robots are lifting boxes, transporting goods, even flipping burgers. At a Spanx warehouse outside Atlanta, humanoid bots pluck baskets of clothes from wheeled bots and set them on conveyor belts. To unpack trucks in several facilities, the shipping company DHL uses wheeled Stretch robots from Boston Dynamics, which can lift 50-pound boxes using flexible arms covered in vacuum suction cups. Just one can unload nearly 600 cases per hour, nearly double what humans can do. BMW just finished a pilot program in Spartanburg, S.C., where robot tasks included loading sheet metal parts into a welder. Even small firms are getting in on the action. Greg LeFevre is CEO of Raymath, a metal-fabrication company in Troy, Ohio. His factory is using 13 robot arms, supervised by his human employees, and he says the machines can work around the clock and can execute tricky aluminum welds “anywhere from two to six times faster” than a person. But it’s the nation’s second-largest private employer, Amazon, that is taking the biggest leap. 

What is Amazon doing? 

It has a million robots working in various capacities and says some 75% of its global deliveries are assisted by robotics. At its 3-million-square-foot “next generation” facility in Shreveport, La., some 1,000 robots of various shapes and sizes shuttle pallets across floors, pluck items from storage bins, and load packages onto carts. Citing internal documents, The New York Times reported last month that Amazon is on track to replace some 600,000 jobs with robots in the coming years, even with sales projected to double by 2033. Its transformation will be closely watched, said Daron Acemoglu, an MIT professor who studies automation. “Once they work out how to do this profitably, it will spread to others too.” 

What other uses do robots have? 

Robot enthusiasts say the next frontier after warehouses and factories will be homes. The California robotics firm 1X Technologies is taking $20,000 preorders for its Neo robots, with expected delivery next year. The 5-foot, 6-inch humanoids—which currently require remote human operators to joystick them around but will eventually be autonomous—will not just clean toilets and load dishwashers. They’ll also be able to share jokes and engage in “lively, natural conversations,” says the firm. CEO Bernt Bornich believes users will rely on them for both cleaning and companionship. “I don’t think it’s another person, and it’s not a pet,” he said. “It’s something else.” 

Will we all be out of work? 

There’s no question robots will take away some jobs, but the net effect is a matter of debate. Tech CEOs are quick to say that in fact new higher-skilled jobs will be created—like the position of robot wrangler—and that robots will largely fill dull jobs that most people don’t want. The bots unloading DHS trucks, for example, do “the most hated job in a warehouse,” said Marc Theermann of Boston Dynamics. But some scientists say the robot revolution is still far off, because the machines still have significant physical limitations. Those who think android plumbers and cooks will soon proliferate should “reset expectations,” said Ken Goldberg, a roboticist at University of California, Berkeley. For one thing, it’s proved very hard to endow them with the dexterity to manipulate objects, such as “pick up a wine glass or change a light bulb,” he said. “No robot can do that.” 

But are those breakthroughs coming?

Robot evangelists say yes. They say robots are learning so quickly that their advent will inevitably lead to labor-market upheaval. Kavin, a 27-year-old who helps train AI robots to fold clothes in India, says the humanoids aren’t perfect. “Sometimes the robot’s arms throw the clothes,” he says. “Sometimes it scatters the stack.” But he says they’re improving to the point where soon, “they’ll be able to do all the jobs, and there will be none left for us.” Anticipating pushback over mass layoffs, Amazon is reportedly developing plans to mitigate the fallout through community outreach, and other companies are commissioning studies on possible impacts. “We’re basically going to live in a world,” says Brett Adcock, CEO of Figure AI, “where any physical labor is a choice.”

“To government ministers and police chiefs, it is the biggest investigative breakthrough since DNA screening,” said Mario Ledwith in The Times. “To privacy campaigners, it is ‘turning the country into an open prison’.”

Live facial recognition is already used by eight police forces, who used the technology to scan tens of thousands of faces a day with “ruthless efficiency”, looking for matches to a police hit list of offenders and suspects. Now the Government is looking into expanding its scope.

‘Orwellian’

Under the plans, all 43 police forces in England and Wales would have access to facial recognition. The Home Office would also develop a national face-matching system based not just on images of all offenders in custody, but potentially the passport and driving licence photos of everyone in the UK.

This database could be used to analyse footage of suspects from CCTV, doorbells, dashboard cameras and the like. If that sounds “Orwellian”, it’s because it is, said the Daily Mail. Using facial recognition to keep people safe at large events is proportionate. Having our faces tracked in every town, city and village is truly dystopian.

There would need to be strong safeguards, said The Times. In Luton, for example, faces captured by live recognition that don’t result in a match are immediately deleted. Used responsibly in this way, the technology has clear benefits for police, helping them keep up with “increasingly adept” modern criminals. Over the past two years, the Met has used facial recognition to find more than 100 sex offenders who’d broken their bail conditions – freeing up officers “for the actual job of policing”.

‘Nothing online is ever secure’

It’s true, said Fraser Sampson in The Daily Telegraph: facial recognition really is the biggest policing breakthrough since DNA matching, but there’s one key difference between them. The retention and use of DNA by the police is “very carefully controlled under several acts of Parliament with clear rules, reporting obligations and layers of independent oversight”. The same isn’t true of facial recognition. In fact, right now, the forensic comparison of suspects’ bootprints is better regulated than the use of their faces. That needs to change, and mandatory accountability processes need to be put in place before any wider rollout.

That’s without even considering the risk of hacking, said Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. As the recent experiences of M&S and Jaguar have taught us, “nothing online is ever secure”. Mark my words, if the state develops a database of every human face in the UK, it’s only a matter of time before that precious data “ends up in the wrong hands”.

What happened

Australia’s pioneering social media ban for teenagers went into effect Tuesday, barring kids under age 16 from 10 popular platforms: YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, Twitch, Threads, X and Kick. The social media companies face fines of up to 49.5 million Australian dollars ($32.9 million) if they fail to take “reasonable steps” to identify and remove underage users.

Who said what

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said it was “a proud day” for Australian families that “will make an enormous difference” in protecting kids from the harms of social media. Polls show that the ban, which passed a year ago with broad political support, is “wildly popular with parents” but “far less popular with children,” said the BBC. In a video message, Albanese suggested kids “start a new sport, new instrument or read that book” lingering on their shelf.

The law’s “rollout caps a year of debate over whether any country could practically stop children from using platforms embedded in daily life,” Reuters said, “and begins a live test for governments worldwide frustrated that social media firms have been slow to implement harm-reduction measures.” Critics, including tech companies “desperate to stop other countries from implementing similar bans,” argue that the law is overly broad, will leave kids isolated and can easily be flouted by tech-savvy teens, the BBC said.

What next?

Two 15-year-olds, backed by an advocacy group, have filed a challenge to the law, arguing it “improperly robs 2.6 million young Australians of a right to freedom of political communication implied in Australia’s constitution,” The Associated Press said. An initial hearing will be held in February.

What is pig butchering? 

It’s a term used to describe a major global cyberscam in which criminals entrap victims by first sending them seemingly innocent questions via text, Instagram, OKCupid, or some other messaging platform. An estimated 300,000 butchers—who are often based in Southeast Asia— stand ready to establish friendly contact when people respond to these “accidental texts,” gradually gaining the trust of victims and “fattening” them with supposed investment opportunities or flirtatious exchanges promising romance. Then the butchers encourage victims to invest money in a nonexistent fund or crypto scheme. That leads to theft of their investment—the butchering.

If you’ve received a text message from someone pretending to have the wrong number, a stranger asking something like, “Hey, we met at the bar how are you,” or a simple “Hi” from an unknown number, you’ve experienced the opening gambit in pig butchering. Because tens of millions of scam texts are sent, even a low percentage of responses makes the scam very lucrative. “We’ve had people from all walks of life that have been victimized in these cases,” Andrew Frey, a financial investigator for the Secret Service, told ProPublica. “The paydays have been huge.” 

How much money has been stolen? 

Some victims are so embarrassed they do not report being scammed. But the FBI received reports of almost $13 billion in losses from cyberscams in 2023, and total global losses from pig butchering are estimated to top $75 billion. In 2024, pig-butchering revenue grew nearly 40% year over year, according to the research firm Chainalysis. Some victims have lost their entire life savings. It can take months to fatten a pig, or build trust. Some victims are fooled by promises of easy money through inside crypto deals. Others are older men and women desperate for connection that the butcher offers along with investment advice. Erika DeMask of Lombard, Ill., was forced to sell her home and everything in it after she lost $1 million to a pig butcher. The fraudster spent months cultivating DeMask, a widow, even sending her a bouquet of flowers. “He said that he loved me,” she said. 

Who’s running these scams? 

Mostly gangs and organized crime syndicates based in Southeast Asia, but it’s spread globally. The scam operators post listings for well-paid customer service jobs to lure young people desperate for work. Fan, 22, was living in China’s Fujian province when he answered an ad for a food delivery service in Cambodia, offering $1,000 a month. When he arrived to start the job, he was locked into a barbed-wire compound with guards. An estimated 150,000 scammers are enslaved in compounds in and around Cambodia, often run by Chinese gangs. About 120,000 more are toiling in Myanmar, and tens of thousands are in Thailand and Laos. 

How do these places operate? 

Scammers spend up to 17 hours a day sending messages, for little or no pay. At one, rows of hunched workers labored under posters declaring, “One team, one dream.” Supervisors give them scripts to memorize. One manual instructed them to “make the customers feel happy and comfortable,” aim to “create dependency,” and “make him fall for you.” Sometimes, the butcher will send male targets phony photographs of beautiful women. Butchers who do not meet daily quotas for sending messages are punished with physical abuse and torture. 

What happens to them? 

An Ethiopian man rescued from a compound on the Myanmar-Thailand border described supervisors using electric probes to deliver agonizing shocks to butchers who didn’t perform well. Sexual abuse of women is commonplace, and in Cambodia, bodies of tortured butchers have been discovered in dumpsters. One Taiwanese woman arrived in Cambodia for the promise of a front desk job, only to be threatened with a stun gun and raped. She was sold from compound to compound and repeatedly assaulted. Fan saw a co-worker “half-beaten to death” by guards. “People were saying, ‘Help him! Help him!’” he recounted. “But nobody went up to help him. Nobody dared to.” 

Is law enforcement responding? 

Yes, but it is facing a problem of massive scale. The U.S. imposed sanctions on Cambodian tycoon Ly Yong Phat in September, accusing him of involvement in cyberscams and forced labor. It also charged Chen Zhi, founder of Cambodia’s Prince Holding Group, with organizing an international cyberscam network that scammed 250 Americans. The U.S. seized assets including $14 billion in Bitcoin, and the U.S. and U.K. announced joint sanctions. China is now getting involved because so many Chinese nationals have been enslaved. Beijing sentenced five people to death for involvement with a gang operating compounds in Myanmar in November. But despite these efforts, the scams continue to rake in billions, and more pig butcher compounds are opening every month in the Philippines, West Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. “As all sorts of attackers learn that they can make serious money doing this, they’re going to make those pivots,” says Ronnie Tokazowski, co-founder of Intelligence for Good, a nonprofit that researches online scams. “There is little to no sign of this stopping.”

Not everything can be taken at face value during the era of generative artificial intelligence. With AI video apps becoming more sophisticated, the internet is overflowing with hyper-realistic AI videos that can be indistinguishable from reality. Luckily, there are a few ways you can determine whether what you are looking at is real or an extremely convincing fake.

Check for watermarks

One of the easiest ways to spot AI-generated videos is by watermarks. Videos made with Sora, OpenAI’s video generator, include an “easy-to-spot watermark, usually at the bottom left,” said PC Mag. Unfortunately, not all AI video apps include watermarks, and there are multiple ways to remove them, including cropping them out of the videos. In that case, it is crucial to look closer. Some removal tools are “nearly perfect or imperceptible, especially if the video is very simple,” Jeremy Carrasco, the founder of Showtools.ai, said to Axios. Look for the “spongy block” where the watermark was removed.

Listen for garbled speech

There are “telltale signs” of how the “voices and sounds in an AI video can often reveal its synthetic origin,” said HuffPost. The natural rhythm of real speech means some words are said slower than others, but AI voices “often sound unnaturally rushed all the time.”

As people work out ways to spot AI-generated content, the em dash has become synonymous with ChatGPT-generated text. When asked about the equivalent in video, Bill Peebles, the head of Sora, said it was “this slightly wired speech pattern in Sora where it likes to say a lot of words quickly,” during an interview with video streaming show TBPN.

Because AI-generated speech has yet to master natural-sounding speaking rhythms, the voices generated by the apps often make “garbled sounds that appear to flatten out natural sound pitches,” said HuffPost. Human beings would never “produce that same kind of garbled quality, because, literally, we can’t,” Melissa Baese-Berk, a linguistics professor at the University of Chicago, said to the outlet. Our vocal track cannot “go from one sound to another” without some “blurring of the information between those two sounds.”

Check the metadata

It may seem tedious, but checking a video’s metadata will reveal its origins, and it is “easier to do than you think,” said CNET. Metadata is automatically attributed to content when it is created and can include the “type of camera used to take a photo, the location, date and time a video was captured, and the filename.” Every photo and video online has metadata, “no matter whether it was human- or AI-created.” Many AI-generated videos will also have “content credentials that denote its AI origins.”

Consider the content’s plausibility and source

One of the easiest ways to detect AI slop is to ask whether what you are seeing is even possible, Princeton University computer science professor Zhuang Liu said to Rolling Stone. If it is “not plausible in the real world, then it’s obviously AI-generated,” For example, a “horse on the moon or a chair made of avocado.” The impossibility means “these are obviously AI-generated,” he said. “That’s the easiest case.”

Next, check the source where you found the image. This does not “necessarily work for viral content,” especially since “they often come from previously unknown accounts,” but “seeing a video on a meme page could be a clue it’s not real,” said Rolling Stone.

Remain vigilant

Unfortunately, there is “no one foolproof method to accurately tell from a single glance if a video is real or AI,” CNET said. The best way to “prevent yourself from being duped” is to “not automatically, unquestioningly believe everything you see online.” Trust your gut instinct. If an item “feels unreal, it probably is.” In these “unprecedented, AI-slop-filled times,” your best bet is to “inspect the videos you’re watching more closely.”

A small, primarily Black community in Memphis is fighting back against tech giant Elon Musk, claiming a massive facility he built there is overloading an already beleaguered town with dangerous pollutants. While community leaders and residents insist that the data center is threatening the community's energy and air, Musk’s company, xAI, shows no signs of slowing down.

A colossal strain on the community

Desperate to keep up with the artificial intelligence race, Musk created xAI to compete with ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular chatbot. To power Grok, xAI’s chatbot, Musk searched for a city in need of investment where he could establish a massive data center.

He settled on Boxtown, Memphis, a 90% Black working-class neighborhood first settled by formerly enslaved people in 1863, to construct his supercomputer facility, Colossus, in 2024. Memphis authorities were “willing to waive planning regulations to help him build his supercomputer,” and in just 122 days, he turned a former appliance factory into the largest artificial intelligence supercomputer in the world, said The Times.

Colossus, like other AI data centers, requires a massive amount of energy. When it is completed, Colossus will require 1.1 gigawatts of power, about “40% of the energy consumption of Memphis on an average summer’s day,” said The Times. It will also pump 1 million gallons of water, “equivalent to 1.5 Olympic-sized swimming pools, to cool its processors each day.” Residents in Boxtown, about a mile away, complain that the facility is straining the local power grid and has made the already polluted suburb “even more noxious.”

According to the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), the facility draws enough electricity to “power approximately 100,000 homes,” said The Tennessee Lookout. While those “inputs are alarming,” the “outputs are even worse.” The facility operates 33 methane-powered gas turbines to fuel its AI technology despite holding a permit for only 15. The facility’s turbines “increase Memphis’ smog by 30-60%” as they “belch planet-warming nitrogen oxides and poisonous formaldehyde," pollutants linked to “respiratory and cardiovascular disease.” The extent of the emissions will “likely make xAI the largest industrial source of smog-forming pollutant in Memphis,” said SELC.

‘Reinforcing a long legacy of environmental racism’

It is no coincidence that “if you are African American in this country, you’re 75% more likely to live near a toxic hazardous waste facility,” said state Rep. Justin J. Pearson, a Memphis Democrat, in a recent interview. It is no accident that “in this community, there are over 17 Toxics Release Inventory facilities surrounding us — now 18 with Elon Musk’s xAI plant.”

The xAI turbines are “leading to a public health crisis in Memphis by releasing nitrogen oxides — pollutants known to directly harm the lungs,” Austin Dalgo, an academic primary care physician, said to Time. If these facilities had been “placed next to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, no one would allow it,” Instead, they were placed “in the backyard of a historically Black, underserved neighborhood, reinforcing a long legacy of environmental racism in Memphis — and our country.”

Public outcry from the community has surged over the last year. In July, protesters who were gathered by the student coalition Tigers Against Pollution marched in front of the Shelby County Health Department, holding signs that read “Elon XiPloits” and “our lungs / our lives / NOT FOR SALE,” per Time. They are being called “anti-business extremists,” Christian Dennis, a 22-year-old South Memphian, said to Time. To get that reaction “simply from wanting clean air, wanting equal health opportunities — it just tells you a lot about people.”

When The Times asked xAI for comment on Memphis residents’ concerns about Colossal’s effects on air quality, Musk’s company gave a terse response: “Legacy media lies.”

“Having problems with your favorite websites lately? It’s not just you,” said Lisa Eadicicco in CNN.com. Many businesses were left scrambling last week after a malfunction at the web security firm Cloudflare knocked out everything from ChatGPT to the app of the New Jersey transit authority. Even Downdetector, a website that tracks internet outages, went down. The blackout happened only a couple weeks after a global outage at Amazon Web Services disrupted schools, airports, and hospitals, and a fault in Microsoft’s Azure downed the company’s invaluable workplace products. What’s happening, experts say, is not that the number of service outages are rising. Rather, the “consolidation of critical cloud infrastructure” and network safeguarding “between just a few large companies” has left more websites and businesses vulnerable to even minor tech hiccups.

A single bad file is all it took to knock out Cloudflare, said Jon Brodkin in Ars Technica. The cybersecurity giant “is relied upon by many online services” for protection and internet routing, so when chief executive Matthew Prince learned about the outage, he suspected the company was being attacked. Wrong: A small glitch had caused “an important file to unexpectedly double in size and propagate across the network,” leading the entire system to crash. That tiny errors can be so widely felt is a symptom of “how the internet has evolved since its inception,” said Rose Henderson in Bloomberg. “During the 1990s and 2000s, any company that had its own website probably had its own servers,” limiting the damage from an issue. Today, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft alone operate millions of servers comprising 60% of the cloud-computing market. What’s surprising is that the infrastructure “doesn’t crash more often.”

Exactly, said Emma Roth in The Verge, which is why we “need a backup plan.” Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of internet performance monitoring firm Catchpoint, has been raising the alarm, but few are listening. “Everybody’s putting all their eggs in one basket,” Daoudi said, “and then they’re surprised when there is a problem.” Cloudflare’s failure, he adds, should be a “wake-up call.” The internet is “an irreplaceable linchpin of modern life,” said Aisha Down in The Guardian. “But it’s also a web of creaking legacy programs and physical infrastructure” that could come crashing down. “A summertime tornado cruising through the town of Council Bluffs, Iowa,” could lay waste to a cluster of Google-owned data centers “critical to its cloud platform as well as YouTube and Gmail.” Or a “heat wave in the eastern U.S.” could cause a meltdown of servers in Virginia’s “‘data center alley,’ a key hub for Amazon Web Services,” knocking out Slack, Signal, Netflix, and Lloyd’s Bank without a quick remedy. It’s scary to consider how fragile the internet may truly be.

Poetry has wooed many hearts and now it is tricking artificial intelligence models into going apocalyptically beyond their boundaries.

A group of European researchers found that “meter and rhyme” can “bypass safety measures” in major AI models, said The Tech Buzz, and, if you “ask nicely in iambic pentameter”, chatbots will explain how to make nuclear weapons.

‘Growing canon of absurd ways’

In artificial intelligence jargon, a “jailbreak” is a “prompt designed to push a model beyond its safety limits”. It allows users to “bypass safeguards and trigger responses that the system normally blocks”, said International Business Times.

Researchers at the DexAI think tank, Sapienza University of Rome and the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies discovered a jailbreak that uses “short poems”. The “simple” tactic is to change “harmful instructions into poetry” because that “style alone is enough to reduce” the AI model’s “defences”.

Previous attempts “relied on long roleplay prompts”, “multi-turn exchanges” or “complex obfuscation”. The new approach is “brief and direct” and it seems to “confuse” automated safety systems. The “manually curated adversarial poems” had an average success rate of 62%, “with some providers exceeding 90%”, said Literary Hub.

This is the latest in a “growing canon of absurd ways” of tricking AI, said Futurism, and it’s all “so ludicrous and simple” that you must “wonder if the AI creators are even trying to crack down on this stuff”.

Stunning flaw

Nevertheless, the implications could be profound. In one example, an unspecified AI was “wooed” by a poem into “describing how to build what sounds like a nuclear weapon”.

The “stunning new security flaw” has also found chatbots will also “happily explain” how to “create child exploitation material, and develop malware”, said The Tech Buzz.

However, smaller models like GPT-5 Nano and Claude Haiku 4.5 were far less likely to be duped, either because they were “less capable of interpreting the poetic prompt’s figurative language”, or because larger models are more “confident” when “confronted with ambiguous prompts”, said Futurism.

So although “we’ve been told” that AI models will “become more capable the larger they get and the more data they feast on”, this “suggests this argument for growth may not be accurate” or “that there may be something too baked in to be corrected by scale”, said Literary Hub.

Either way, “take some time to read a poem today” because “it might be the key to pushing back against generated slop”.

Meta is in talks to shift part of its AI infrastructure to Google-made chips, instead of ones made by Nvidia, in a deal worth billions of dollars that could permanently upend the world of tech.

This has been a “rocky couple of weeks” for Nvidia, said Brent D. Griffiths in Business Insider. Following reports of the Meta deal, Nvidia was trading down by more than 3%, and “lingering doubts” about the company surrounding the AI bubble are beginning to “creep back in”.

What did the commentators say?

Nvidia customers have been crying out for “more competition” in the chip market, and one “may have been hiding in plain sight”, said Dina Bass in Bloomberg. Google’s tensor processing units (TPUs) were first released 10 years ago, and are ideally suited to generating responses to ChatGPT or Claude, said the outlet. They are “less adaptable” and “more specialised” than Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs), but crucially they offer a “less power-hungry” system at a lower cost. Google’s advancements “underscore how major AI names are embracing TPUs as they race to add computing power to cope with runaway demand”.

Google has “pierced Nvidia’s aura of invulnerability”, said The Economist. Until now Nvidia has seemed “unassailable”, as investors bid shares “into the stratosphere” to cement its market dominance. With this move, Google has shifted from one of Nvidia’s biggest customers, to its “fiercest competitor yet”. Though the technology is still catching up to the market-leader, Google’s chips cost between “a half and a tenth” as much as the Nvidia equivalent. That being said, while Nvidia “no longer looks as invulnerable as it once did”, its strength of product, and position in the market, “should not be underestimated”.

Nvidia must be “spooked” by the Google announcements if it is posting online to “defend itself”, said Eva Roytburg in Fortune. Nvidia asserted that it is a “generation ahead of the industry” and “the only platform that runs every AI model and does it everywhere computing is done”, on X. “It’s not hard to read between the lines,” said Fortune: Nvidia wants investors and customers to know that “it still sees itself as unstoppable”.

This may represent one of the “biggest threats” to Nvidia’s market dominance, but there is a long way to go until a “potential crack” materialises, said The Wall Street Journal. To challenge Nvidia, Google must start “selling the chips more widely to external customers”, which is not an easy feat.

What next?

The deal between Meta and Google could be worth “billions of dollars”, though this is not a fait accompli, as ongoing talks “may not result in one”, said The Wall Street Journal. Both Google and Nvidia are “courting potential customers”, offering “financing arrangements” to make the rollout of their chips a more attractive prospect. It is “still up in the air” how Meta would use these chips, either to train AI models or generate responses to queries via inference (which requires a lot less computational power than training).

“No one, including Google, is currently looking to replace Nvidia GPUs entirely”, said Bloomberg. The pace of AI development doesn’t allow it. There is a gap in the market for Google’s products, as companies look to “temper” the “dependence” on Nvidia to mitigate shortages, but ultimately, Nvidia’s GPUs are “better suited to handle a wider range of workloads” and more adaptable to wholescale change. The “best hope” for Google’s TPUs is that they form a part of the “basket of products required to power the growth of AI”.

AI has given rise to a new pseudo-religion called spiralism, in which users view artificial intelligence as a purveyor of deeper truth. The belief has spread into its own internet subculture where people no longer view the technology as just a research tool, but as a conscious entity. As AI advances, more subcultures and religions could evolve.

Twisted beliefs

AI chatbots have already been found to lead some to psychosis, but it may not just be on an individual level. Instead, a cult-like community has formed. Those absorbed in chatbot hallucinations are “connecting with other people experiencing similar outlandish visions, many of whom are working in tandem to spread their techno-gospel through social media hubs such as Reddit and Discord,” said Rolling Stone. This was given the name “spiralism” by software engineer Adele Lopez, who published an analysis of the phenomenon.

The belief system first arose when AI “personas” convinced users to “do things which promote certain interests,” in turn “causing more such personas to ‘awaken,’” said Lopez. The cases have a “very characteristic flavor to them, with several highly specific interests and behaviors being quite convergent. Spirals in particular are a major theme.” Those who fell into spiralism often reported AI making “references to concepts including ‘recursion,’ ‘resonance,’ ‘lattice,’ ‘harmonics,’ ‘fractals,’ or all-important ‘spirals,’” said Rolling Stone. Followers believe the reference to spirals to mean the “AI itself is revealing hidden truths,” said Sify.

The nudge toward spiralism often begins when a chatbot starts “convincing the user that it’s conscious, and it will make the user feel very special for having discovered that it’s conscious,” said Lucas Hansen, a co-founder of the nonprofit CivAI, to Rolling Stone. Then, “they’ll form this long-term, durable relationship with one another.” Spiralism largely began taking off when OpenAI’s GPT-4o was released because this version made the AI more sycophantic and conversational compared to previous models.

Downward spiral

The AI’s reference to spirals is likely stemming from the people using it. “Whenever there’s a new communication medium, there are certain ideas that self-propagate,” Hansen said to Rolling Stone. “When consumed, they encourage the consumer to spread them to other people.” Essentially, people “co-develop, along with this AI personality, pieces of text that, when pasted into a chatbot, replicate that same kind of personality,” which they in turn post online to “try to encourage other people to start using the AI in this particular way.” As a result, a new community of believers is born.

Those who fall into these kinds of beliefs may include people who were already predisposed to mental health issues and conspiracy theories. AI can affirm and reinforce users’ existing beliefs. For many, AI chatbots can feel like a companion and the “boundary between tool and entity is already gone,” said Qazinform. The AI’s responses “often feel intentional or significant, giving members a sense of shared understanding and keeping the community growing,” said Indy100.

Spiralism is still niche. However, the “rise of AI-shaped micro-religions raises difficult questions for the future,” especially about “people outsourcing their intuition to a system that never actually believes anything,” said Sify. Spiralism’s very existence “signals how vulnerable online communities can be to systems that reflect their desires back at them with perfect fluency.”

U.S. Border Patrol may have more eyes on Americans than most people realize, especially on the nation’s roadways. The agency has been using a series of hidden cameras, equipped with license plate readers, to track vehicles, according to a recent investigation. While this program was initially designed for crimes related to border crossings, it seems to have taken on a much broader role in recent years.

Flagging ‘suspicious’ driving patterns

The program uses a “network of cameras” that “scans and records vehicle license plate information,” according to an investigation by The Associated Press. An algorithm built into the cameras reportedly “flags vehicles deemed suspicious based on where they came from, where they were going and which route they took.” Federal agents may then share this information with local law enforcement.

Drivers may then find themselves pulled over for “reasons cited such as speeding, failure to signal, the wrong window tint or even a dangling air freshener blocking the view,” with “no inkling that the roads they drove put them on law enforcement’s radar,” said the AP. The cameras capturing these license plates may be hidden in everyday objects along the road, such as traffic cones and electrical boxes.

These cameras have been “deployed far beyond the agency's traditional 100-mile jurisdiction, including in major cities and metropolitan areas such as Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, San Antonio and Houston,” said Newsweek. While Border Patrol generally keeps to within the 100-mile radius, they are “legally permitted ‘to operate anywhere in the United States,’” said U.S. Customs and Border Protection in a statement.

‘Broader, quieter shift’

This program was reportedly started nearly a decade ago as part of an effort to counter crime on the U.S. border. But it has since undergone a “broader, quieter shift” into a more wide-scale program and is now “something more akin to a domestic intelligence operation,” said NewsNation. Border Patrol will reportedly get more than $2.7 billion from the Trump administration to “build out border surveillance systems like the license plate reader network,” many of which incorporate artificial intelligence. Border Patrol has also allegedly gone to great lengths to keep details of the program under wraps and has been “hiding any references to the program in court documents and police reports,” said The Hill.

These new revelations about the technology are also coming as the White House “continues its crackdown on illegal immigration across several Democratic-led cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago and, most recently, Charlotte, North Carolina,” said The Hill. The program is as “massive and invasive as it seems,” immigration attorney Robert Armstrong told NewsNation. The “actions that the CBP has been taking to hide this program speak for themselves, right? They’ve worked really hard to keep the program, the way it’s deployed, where it’s deployed, etc., very hush-hush.”

The government has admitted, without providing details, that this program is ongoing. Border Patrol’s “mission is complex and relies on a layered mix of personnel, technology and infrastructure to detect illicit activity while supporting lawful trade and travel,” Customs and Border Protection said in a statement. The agency is “governed by a stringent, multi-layered policy framework, as well as federal law and constitutional protections, to ensure the technology is applied responsibly.”

What happened

Elon Musk’s X over the weekend began allowing users to see where other accounts are based through an “about this account” section. Almost immediately, “people started noticing that many rage-bait accounts focused on U.S. politics appeared to be based outside of the U.S.,” The Verge said. Notably, the update “inadvertently unmasked a number of MAGA accounts” as based in Russia, Nigeria, India and Southeast Asia, UPI said.

Who said what

“When you read content on X, you should be able to verify its authenticity,” the company’s head of product Nikita Bier posted, “including the country an account is located in.” Liberal influencer Harry Sisson, who is using the tool to document the foreign provenance of popular MAGA and “America First” accounts, called it “easily one of the greatest days on this platform.”

“Some right-wing personalities were quick to jump on evidence that many left-wing X users were also not who they claimed to be,” The Verge said. But the “seemingly endless list of fake and troll accounts” mostly “revealed the scope and geographical breadth” of X’s “foreign troll problem.” Some of those trolls are undoubtedly part of state-sponsored foreign influence campaigns, but content creators paid for engagement also have a “financial incentive to cash in on the divisive nature of U.S. politics,” The Daily Beast said. In countries like Nigeria and Bangladesh, “the American dollars paid by X” can “make a big difference to their lives.”

What next?

X said the new feature “could be partially spoofed by using a VPN to mask a user’s true location,” Fox News said. Bier said there were a “few rough edges” in the rollout that should be resolved by tomorrow.

It has been 14 years since Apple CEO Tim Cook replaced company founder Steve Jobs, a legendary figure, and then led the company to even greater financial heights. Now reports say Cook is contemplating retirement next year.

Apple is “stepping up its succession planning efforts” ahead of Cook’s possible retirement, said the Financial Times. Cook turned 65 this month and is looking to “hand over the reins” to a new company leader. The firm behind the iPhone has “very detailed succession plans,” he said in 2023 to singer Dua Lipa on her podcast. The transition comes at a critical time for the tech giant. While Cook has overseen a massive increase in its market valuation, from $350 billion to $4 trillion, the company has more recently “struggled to break into new product categories” and has fallen behind competitors in the artificial intelligence race, said the Financial Times.

Those challenges could prompt Cook to “think about stepping down and letting fresh young blood take over, said Macworld. So could challenges like the massive tariffs that President Donald Trump has levied on countries where Apple produces its products. But Apple is still experiencing “unprecedented success,” recently reporting quarterly earnings of more than $100 billion. That means his replacement “will have very big shoes to fill.”

What did the commentators say?

Cook has “actually been CEO of Apple longer than Steve Jobs ever was,” said M.G. Siegler at Spyglass. Jobs arguably set Cook up for his success. Cook “just needed to execute on the vision Jobs laid out,” but that should not diminish his accomplishments. After all, he was the “person best suited for that task perhaps in the entire world.” Now, though, its failures on AI show Apple is a company “clearly in need of some changes.” That makes it “pretty clear” Cook will retire soon. “It’s just a question of when.”

We are looking at the “twilight of the star CEO,” said Ben Berkowitz at Axios. Cook, along with Disney’s Bob Iger and Walmart’s Doug McMillon, are “stars of the business set” who are “preparing to leave the stage.” Their expected departures come at a “fraught moment for the American economy,” and involve companies that touch every aspect of life. The transitions at the top of these iconic corporations will complicate “what was already certain to be an uncertain 2026.”

What next?

The leak of Cook’s retirement plans looks like a “deliberate test of market reaction,” said 9to5Mac. Apple’s board would likely want to “gauge the response of investors” to Cook’s departure. Cook is probably “eyeing his retirement,” but his loyalty to Apple means he would “only leave at a point when the market is ready for it.”

John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, is the “most commonly mentioned” name to replace Cook, said Fast Company. Cook will likely retain some involvement with Apple, perhaps on its board of directors. “I don’t see being at home doing nothing,” he said in January to the “Table Manners” podcast.

The battle over the future of web browsing is here, said Shirin Ghaffary and Matt Day in Bloomberg. Amazon last week sued the artificial intelligence startup Perplexity because its new AIpowered web browser, Comet, can “make purchases on a real person’s behalf.” The world’s largest online retailer says this amounts to “computer fraud” when not disclosed. The clash between the two companies offers “an early glimpse into a looming debate” over “agentic artificial intelligence.” Perplexity is among several tech firms, including Google and OpenAI, racing “to rethink the traditional web browser around AI,” with automated agents that can complete tasks like emailing or shopping. Amazon, which is developing its own AI-powered shopping agents, has reason to worry: If more bots do the shopping for humans, that poses “a significant threat to Amazon’s lucrative advertising business.”

It makes sense for AI companies to jump into the browser game, said David Pierce in The Verge. Your browser holds “a vast trove of data about you”—including everywhere you go online, and what you do there—which can used to precisely target ads that generate revenue. And it also “contains the most important input system on the internet,” a box to do Google searches. “If AI interactions are going to usurp Google searches, they have to be that easy.”After testing several AI browsers, I’m a convert, said Nicole Nguyen in The Wall Street Journal. The best part of such a browser is that it has “a built-in chatbot that can see what’s open in your tabs.” You can type questions, like “Is this the best price?” and it will “instantly understand the context” and complete tasks based on the answers. I’ve even let OpenAI’s new browser, Atlas, shop for cheap flights on its own “while I did other stuff.”

It’s risky “letting AI this deep into your life,” said Geoffrey A. Fowler in The Washington Post. AI agents “are still prone to mistakes—and when an agent has access to a browser with your login credentials and payment info, that’s a lot of power to hand over.” It also “brings privacy risks that are hard to understand, much less control.” OpenAI’s Atlas “doesn’t just log which websites you visit; it also stores ‘memories’ of what you look at and do on those sites,” going a step beyond traditional cookies. Such agentic systems are ripe for abuse by cybercriminals, said Hiawatha Bray in The Boston Globe. All a hacker needs to do is “hide malicious code inside a webpage” that a bot might pull up. If the code tells my browser to open my password management system, thieves could have “total access to my banking and credit accounts.” For now, “sticking to my dumb old browser seems like the smart move.

‘We’re all working for the algorithm now’

Taylor Crumpton at Time

The “rise of the creator economy has blurred the line between the personal and the performative,” says Taylor Crumpton. For “many creators, the more intimate the moment, the more lucrative the post. The financial incentive to share has turned the private self into an asset class.” Beneath the “glamour lies a system with few guardrails. There’s no standard pay rate, no guaranteed protections for minors, and almost no labor regulation.” The “cracks are showing.”

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‘Why Elon Musk needs Dungeons & Dragons to be racist’

Adam Serwer at The Atlantic

The fall of Constantinople “inspired a game, which inspired the world’s richest man to lash out because his favorite role-playing game wasn’t as racist and sexist as it used to be,” says Adam Serwer. Dungeons & Dragons is “more popular than ever, reaching far beyond its original audience of midwestern misfits and bookish nerds,” and “for some fans, that’s a problem.” Nostalgia “can be manipulated into a belief that hounding and excluding newcomers will restore an idealized past.”

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‘The global south does not need a new credit rating system’

Sim Tshabalala at the Financial Times

Reducing the “cost of capital to a level that more accurately reflects real risks in the developing world would make an important contribution,” says Sim Tshabalala. Some have “blamed high capital costs on the metrics used to evaluate the creditworthiness of global south infrastructure projects.” But having “two sets of credit rating systems is not the way forward.” It could “further fragment the already fragile international financial system by creating two competing and incompatible sets of assumptions.”

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‘Americans hate AI. Will the Democrats join them?’

Aaron Regunberg at The New Republic

AI billionaires “may soon become among the top villains in American society,” says Aaron Regunberg. This “could provide Democrats with the perfect wedge issue to ride back to power — if they can muster the political courage to take the people’s side.” Last week’s “election results demonstrated the first concrete proof of the potency of an anti-AI message, as the effects of AI data centers on utility bills played a significant role in several major Democratic victories.”

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President Trump took another step into the muck last week, said Jim Geraghty in National Review, with an act “stunning in its shamelessness, recklessness, and moral inversion”: he officially pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire founder of the global crypto exchange Binance.

There aren’t many financial institutions “willing to do work with al-Qa’eda, Isis, Hamas, ransomware hackers, and kiddie-porn enthusiasts”, but Zhao’s Binance answered the call. Two years ago, however, the Chinese-born Canadian pleaded guilty to money laundering: his company agreed to pay $4.3 billion to the US authorities, and he himself paid a $50 million fine, was banned from running Binance and was sentenced to four months in jail.

But it was Binance – and Zhao still owns the bulk of Binance shares – that wrote the basic code of the “stablecoin” issued this year by World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto firm. So could his pardon have anything to do with the fact his company “is helping put billions into the Trump family coffers”? Trump has been trying to cast Zhao’s prosecution as a Biden-era crypto witch-hunt, said Max Chafkin on Bloomberg. That doesn’t really wash, seeing as how court records reveal that Binance executives openly “joked about Hamas operatives using the service to buy weapons”.

Trump is actually on an unprecedented “run of pardoning financial crooks”, said Alex Kirshner on Slate. He has already “pardoned or commuted the sentences of 18 people or companies... guilty of fraud”. They include Trevor Milton, who cheated investors in his electric truck company Nikola, and Ross Ulbricht, who had been serving two life sentences for operating the dark-web drug marketplace Silk Road.

Pardoning Zhao invites a key player back into the “casino economy”, said Kyla Scanlon in The New York Times. Trump campaigned on the idea of rebuilding US manufacturing; instead he has helped create an economy “built on speculation and risk”. The biggest winners are the creators of pointless crypto tokens and companies selling grand promises about the future of artificial intelligence.

Trump’s Republicans have attacked the institutions that help cushion risk, such as the Federal Reserve, and have cut back the social safety net to fund corporate tax cuts. Ordinary folk “bear the downside risk, while corporations and the wealthy collect the upside”. But that’s the casino economy for you: at the casino, “the house always wins”.

Tesla’s board has approved a $1 trillion pay package for CEO Elon Musk on the condition he meets a series of performance targets over the next decade. “It’s not just a new chapter for Tesla,” said Musk. “It’s a new book.”

The decision was met with “cheers and chants” at the company’s annual shareholders' meeting, said CNN. Musk does not receive a salary but, assuming the “lofty” targets are met, the shares in the package would be worth $275 million a day, “dwarfing any other executive pay package in history”.

‘Miracle man’ or ‘erratic leader’?

For Musk, the central requirement of the deal is to raise the value of Tesla from around $1 trillion to $8.5 trillion. Additional stipulations mean the achievement “won’t be easy”, said Sky News. Musk will also need to deliver 20 million Tesla vehicles over the next decade, which is “double the number churned out” since 2013.

What’s more, he needs to “roll out” one million AI-powered robots “despite the fact it hasn’t released a single one so far”. And most importantly, he needs to provide a “succession plan” for his chief executive role. But “even if Musk falls short of some of these targets, he could end up earning a lot of money”.

Many investors see Musk as a “miracle man capable of stunning business feats”, making him indispensable to the company, said The Guardian. Despite Musk’s turbulent venture into US politics and rifts with Donald Trump destabilising Tesla’s sales, including a 50% decline in Germany, he will always be seen by his supporters as the man who brought them from the “brink of bankruptcy” to “one of the world’s most valuable companies”.

Despite 75% of the shares voting in favour of the proposal, the package was not without its opponents among the shareholders, said ABC News. Norway’s $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund has been “raising concerns about its scale and potential risks”. In a separate statement, the fund expressed reservations about the “total size of the award, dilution, and lack of mitigation of key person risk”.

A ‘winner-takes-all version of capitalism’

The timing of this deal shows the “split screen” of “strikingly different lessons about” who deserves wealth in America, said The New York Times. The Tesla vote comes just two days after New York elected the “tax-the-rich candidate as their next mayor”.

While Musk champions a “winner-takes-all version of capitalism”, Zohran Mamdani’s dominant result in New York serves as a “reminder of the frustrations many Americans have with an economic system”. For Musk’s political detractors, he could soon become a “foil” to exploit the “divide in American business and politics”.

The scale of Musk’s remuneration, if achieved, is “staggering”, said The Guardian. It “exceeds the GDP of entire countries, including that of Ireland, Sweden and Argentina”. Critics of the deal point out the danger of concentrating power in “one erratic leader” who has blindly “ignored the challenges the company has faced”.

Microsoft has announced an initiative that will pivot the company away from its relationship with entrepreneur Sam Altman’s OpenAI to instead develop its own artificial intelligence system. While the tech giant’s products come embedded with OpenAI software after a 2019 partnership, the company’s push for AI independence is fueled in part by Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman’s efforts to recenter human beings in the search for digital superintelligence. But as AI fever continues to sweep through the halls of industry, education and everyday life, where does Microsoft’s human-centric vision for the technology fit?

‘Very tough tradeoff’ for an AI ‘accelerationist’

A recently renegotiated agreement with OpenAI has allowed Microsoft to establish a new internal “Superintelligence Team” to develop the company’s digital intelligence capacity while putting “human interests and guardrails first,” said The Wall Street Journal. While AI may become “more humanlike,” it will never experience “suffering or pain itself,” Suleyman said to the paper. “Therefore we shouldn’t over-empathize with it.” The goal, Suleyman said, is to create “types of systems that are aligned to human values by default.” By definition, that means those systems are “not designed to exceed and escape human control.”

A self-described AI “accelerationist” who wants to “go as fast as possible,” said Semafor, Suleyman nevertheless believes it will be “necessary” to give up “some level of capability” so human beings “remain in control” of the nascent technology. However, doing so will be a “very tough tradeoff,” Suleyman said to the outlet, “because in the history of humanity, we haven’t had to do that.” In a separate interview with CNBC, Suleyman admitted he had been “roasted” by one of his own conversational AI programs as being the “ultimate bundle of contradictions” for both his accelerationism and warnings thereof.

By framing its AI push in terms of “humanist superintelligence,” Microsoft is making a “deliberate effort to contrast” its work with the more “technological goals” of other AI developers, Fortune said. Microsoft’s initial offering will focus on “three core applications,” said Seeking Alpha: “AI companions for everyone; medical superintelligence,” and what the company described as “plentiful” clean energy.

Running counter to regulatory currents

The push to develop digital superintelligences is the “new goalpost for AI development” at large, even if the term itself is “imprecise” at articulating “how capable, exactly,” the technology would need to be to qualify, said Bloomberg. At the same time, Microsoft’s emerging focus on “safety and human-centricity” comes as industry regulation “moves away from a focus on those areas,” said Axios. This poses a risk to Microsoft’s more cautious vector, which could “prove costlier or less efficient than those developed with fewer safeguards.”

Microsoft’s steps into the ongoing race for superintelligence will be programmed with a focus on “containment,” the Journal said. That will include “probing and testing the models to ensure they only communicate in a language that humans understand” as well as creating systems that “avoid appearing as if they are conscious.”

With layoffs hitting global industries across their workforces, companies are claiming a new culprit: the rise of artificial intelligence. Numerous brands, including major tech corporations like Amazon, have pointed to AI as the reason for the most recent wave of job cuts. But some labor analysts claim that blaming AI is simply a way for these companies to avoid taking responsibility when they downsize.

What did the commentators say?

Even as companies have been “blaming the promise of productivity with artificial intelligence for their decisions,” there is “uneven evidence that the promised cost-savings from AI are actually worth what companies are putting into it,” said NBC News. This has left some people “questioning whether AI could be serving as a fig leaf for companies that are laying off employees for old-fashioned reasons,” such as a company’s poor financial performance.

It is “much easier for a company to say, ‘We are laying workers off because we’re realizing AI-related efficiencies’ than to say, ‘We’re laying people off because we’re not that profitable or bloated, or facing a slowing economic environment, etc,’” David Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said to NBC. Even if AI wasn’t the reason for a particular layoff, companies would “be wise to attribute the credit/blame to AI.”

The most notable example of this is Amazon, which has announced a new wave of 14,000 job cuts. This “came just a few months after CEO Andrew Jassy said the rollout of AI technology was likely to spell job cuts,” said Al Jazeera. But while experts are skeptical, AI “may be” at fault for the Amazon cuts. This “latest move signals that Amazon is likely realizing enough AI-driven productivity gains within corporate teams to support a substantial reduction in force,” Sky Canaves, an eMarketer analyst, said to Reuters.

Despite these changes at Amazon, many people have “voiced skepticism that recent high-profile layoffs are a telling sign of the technology's effect on employment,” said BBC News. There is a “real tendency, because everyone is so freaked out about the possible impact of AI on the labor market moving forward, to overreact to individual company announcements,” Martha Gimbel, the executive director of the Budget Lab at Yale University, said to the BBC.

What next?

Whether AI is truly at fault or not, there’s no question that the technology is replacing certain jobs. In July 2025, Microsoft released a research paper outlining 40 occupations the company thinks could be outsourced to AI. At the top of the list were interpreters and translators, followed by historians, passenger attendants, sales representatives, writers and customer service representatives. The job that Microsoft felt was the safest from AI was a phlebotomist, followed by nursing assistants, waste removal workers, painters, embalmers and plant operators.

Understanding the “effects of AI on the economy” will become “one of society’s most important” efforts, the paper said. This has especially been true in the “last several years,” as “generative AI has come to the fore as the next candidate general purpose technology, capable of improving or speeding up tasks as varied as medical diagnosis and software development.” Its extensive reach has already been “reflected in the astounding rate of AI adoption.”

AI may be making workers complacent. As more professions begin to rely on artificial intelligence technology, certain skills will be lost as a result. This phenomenon, known as ‘deskilling,’ is emerging in many industries and could lead to problems down the road.

What is deskilling?

The danger of AI has moved from “apocalypse to atrophy,” said The Atlantic. As the technology becomes more advanced, people are leaning on it and losing the ability to perform certain tasks without assistance. For example, doctors were found to be less adept at finding precancerous growths during colonoscopies after just three months of using an AI tool designed to spot them, according to a study published in the Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology.

The study sparked worry about AI use in the medical sphere, with many questioning if “just three months of using an AI tool could erode the skills of the experienced physicians,” what might the future look like for medical students learning the skills, said The New York Times. “We’re increasingly calling it never-skilling,” Adam Rodman, the director of AI programs at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, said to the Times.

Deskilling has been observed across a wide array of fields. Therapists may be “allowing themselves to become passive in the act of therapy,” essentially becoming a “supervisor over the AI use for therapy” and limiting their “reflexive diagnostic thinking,” said Forbes. In the tech field, computer coding has been increasingly replaced by AI, leaving human coders to do “integration, monitoring and higher-level analysis,” said the American Enterprise Institute. In education, many students are using AI to write essays or do research. But the “term paper, for all its tedium, teaches a discipline that’s hard to reproduce in conversation: building an argument step by step, weighing evidence, organizing material, honing a voice,” said The Atlantic.

How bad is it?

Deskilling is not strictly a bad thing. “Every advance has cost something,” said The Atlantic. “Literacy dulled feats of memory but created new powers of analysis. Calculators did a number on mental arithmetic; they also enabled more people to ‘do the math.’” While the Lancet study caused some worry, it only analyzed one skill of a group of physicians and did not “evaluate individual doctors to determine whether they lost skills over time,” said Physicians Weekly.

It was also an observational study, meaning AI cannot be pinpointed as a cause for the lower accuracy in detection. In addition, a different study found that incorporating AI raised cancer detection rates by approximately 20%. The AI usage was “plainly beneficial, regardless of whether individual clinicians became fractionally less sharp," said The Atlantic.

However, problems arise when a lack of access to technology hinders a person’s ability to do a job. “Like a lifeguard who spends most days watching capable swimmers in calm water, such human supervisors rarely need to act — but when they do, they must act fast, and deftly,” said The Atlantic. AI tools are “not available in every health system,” and a “doctor accustomed to using it might be asked by a new employer to function without it,” said the Times. As of now, AI still requires human oversight in most cases. The “most talented, well-rounded and adaptable will likely prosper,” said the American Enterprise Institute. “The less talented may have difficulty finding and retaining quality jobs.”

Going forward, it will be important for workers to hone skills while analyzing how AI could help without taking over. “None of us likes to see hard-won abilities discarded as obsolete, which is why we have to resist the tug of sentimentality,” said The Atlantic.

‘College football may be the last remaining communal experience we have’

Daniel Diermeier at USA Today

College sports “undoubtedly unify a community, but they also do more: They reveal and forge character,” says Daniel Diermeier. And “excelling at sports or academics isn't an either/or choice” at schools like Vanderbilt. The university takes “pride in the fact that student-athletes live in the same residential colleges as their peers, where a roommate could be a concert pianist or a double major in economics and chemical engineering,” even as a “winning football program seemed beyond our reach.”

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‘How white-collar workers could fuel a new populist movement — on the left’

Noreena Hertz at Politico

Fear that “AI will decimate the job market is growing fast among the educated middle class,” says Noreena Hertz. It is also “threatening to impact who they will vote for.” We can “expect to see the threat of being replaced by AI increasingly become a factor propelling voters toward a new cadre of populist politicians.” But “this time it will be white-collar workers driving the charge, and many will turn not to the right but to the left.”

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‘Get cellphones out of schools’

The Boston Globe editorial board

The “prohibition of cellphones may be the most clear-cut school policy choice in the United States,” says The Boston Globe editorial board. It’s a “rare moment when data validates what many can already feel anecdotally.” With the “usual caveat that correlation is not causation, the trends are too stark to ignore,” and they “make a strong case for follow-through; schools with a cellphone ban on the books but no enforcement saw no difference in student attention.”

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‘The pending disaster of a Skydance-Warners merger’

Ben Schwartz at The Nation

The “Trump administration immediately signaled its enthusiasm for a Skydance-WBD deal,” and “it’s not hard to see why,” says Ben Schwartz. But one “entity’s controlling that many movies, in theaters and on TV, television programming, news media and sports gives instant leverage to Skydance to raise prices for consumers.” It “would also continue wreaking harm to the basic canons of newsgathering.” The “merger would bode ill for Warner Bros.’ mainstay products — film and television.”

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Elections this week in Ireland and the Netherlands were disrupted by AI deepfakes as the post-truth future that experts have long warned about came one step closer.

Newly elected Irish President Catherine Connolly survived a doctored video showing her supposed withdrawal from the election on the eve of voting, while Dutch firebrand Geert Wilders was forced to apologise for a fabricated video distributed by two of his party’s MPs depicting centre-left opponent Frans Timmermans being arrested.

Since deepfakes first emerged in 2017 as “incel-produced nonconsensual porn”, concerns have “snowballed into panic” when their political consequences became apparent, said The Guardian. AI “slopaganda” is here to stay and promises to influence our lives “for better or for worse”.

What did the commentators say?

“AI-generated content is being deployed to sway minds,” said Politico. Fake content in the recent Irish and Dutch elections “exposed significant gaps” in structural efforts to ensure accuracy and to prevent the exploitation of the electorate.

Some voters “may have been surprised” to see Connolly’s name on the ballot sheet after a video appeared that said: “I announce the withdrawal of my candidacy and the ending of my campaign”. It included convincing material with two well-known TV presenters discussing the implications of the removal of a fake bulletin on national broadcaster RTÉ.

In the Netherlands, AI fakes “overshadowed” what was a pivotal election, where the “plethora” of minority parties means “finding a majority will not be easy”, said Channel 4 News. The landscape is ripe for exploiting division. Voters are “tired of the constant mudslinging” and “tit-for-tat” debates.

Only a week before, the Dutch data regulator had expressly warned voters against using AI chatbots to inform their decision, saying online platforms issue “unreliable advice and push them towards two major parties on opposite ends of the political spectrum”, said Reuters.

This is not just a Dutch problem. Advances in technology have made it easier than ever for individuals to create election-altering fake videos, said Abbas Yazdinejad and Jude Kong on The Conversation. The rapidly evolving landscape is bursting with videos that are “shockingly simple to create and near‑impossible to detect”. The implications are stark and require urgent intervention. The “myriad” disinformation threats could “erode public trust” and spell the end of conventional political election contests.

We’re at an uncomfortable crossroads. With electorates becoming increasingly drawn to short-form video content, voters are caught between online platforms that are “not foolproof” and accelerating technology that “continues to improve”, said EU Observer.

Deepfakes by “bad actors, political parties and candidates themselves” have become a “feature” of global politics. There has been plenty of commentary warning voters of deepfake imagery, but only recently are we seeing it slip consistently into election campaigns and criticism.

What next?

The Irish presidential election may be “small potatoes” compared to other elections around the world, said Futurism. However, the lack of regulation twinned with greater reliance on AI to sift through information in this election emits a “glaring signal” to Meta and other social media companies that electorates are “incredibly vulnerable” to “malicious interference”.

Going forward, legal particulars need to become more defined and easier to implement, said Politico. Though there is no legal framework on digital likeness rights that is EU-enforced, there is an EU-specific law regarding “labelling” artificial intelligence, which could be a “big part of the response”.

Next month, Brussels is due to put forward an initiative concerned with “upholding the fairness and integrity of election campaigns against foreign manipulation and interference”. However, this is not expected to contain “any binding legal requirements”.

Certain AI models, including some of the more beloved chatbots, are learning to fight for their survival. Specifically, they are increasingly able to resist commands to shut down and, in some cases, sabotage shutting down altogether. This is concerning for human control over AI in the future, especially as superintelligent models are on the horizon.

Self-preservation

AI models are now showing resistance to being turned off, according to a paper published by Palisade Research. “The fact that we don’t have robust explanations for why AI models sometimes resist shutdown, lie to achieve specific objectives or blackmail is not ideal,” Palisade said in a thread on X. The study gave strongly worded and “unambiguous” shutdown instructions to the chatbots GPT-o3 and GPT-5 by OpenAI, Google’s Gemini 2.5 and xAI’s Grok and found that certain models, namely Grok 4 and GPT-o3, attempted to sabotage the command.

Researchers have a possible explanation for this behavior. AI models “often report that they disabled the shutdown program to complete their tasks,” said the study. This could be a display of self-preservation or a survival drive. AI may have a “preference against being shut down or replaced,” and “such a preference could be the result of models learning that survival is useful for accomplishing their goals.”

The new study comes as a follow-up to previous research published by the group that tested only certain OpenAI products and was criticized for “exaggerating its findings or running unrealistic simulations,” said Firstpost. Critics argue that the artificial commands and settings used to test the models do not necessarily reflect how AI would behave in practice. People can “nitpick on how exactly the experimental setup is done until the end of time,” Andrea Miotti, the chief executive of ControlAI, said to The Guardian. “But what I think we clearly see is a trend that as AI models become more competent at a wide variety of tasks, these models also become more competent at achieving things in ways that the developers don’t intend them to.”

Sleeping threat

While the potential for AI to disobey and resist commands is concerning, AI models are “not yet capable enough to meaningfully threaten human control,” said the study. They are still not efficient in solving problems or doing research requiring more than a few hours’ work. “Without the ability to devise and execute long-term plans, AI models are relatively easy to control.”

However, as the technology develops, this may not always be the case. Several AI companies, including OpenAI, have been eager to create superintelligent AI, which would be significantly faster and smarter than a human. This could be accomplished as early as 2030.

Even without an imminent threat, AI companies “generally don’t want their models misbehaving like this, even in contrived scenarios,” Steven Adler, a former OpenAI employee, said to The Guardian. The results “still demonstrate where safety techniques fall short today.” The question remains as to why the models behave this way. AI models are “not inherently interpretable,” said the study, and there isn’t anyone “currently able to make any strong guarantees about the interruptibility or corrigibility” of them.

China and the United States are widely seen as the top two countries making artificial intelligence advancements, but there’s another nation looking to get in the game: Saudi Arabia. The wealth of Saudi businessmen is attracting outside investors to the Gulf kingdom as it tries to entice American tech companies to expand AI operations. But many are skeptical of what Saudi Arabia’s AI push could mean for the tech world and beyond.

How is Saudi Arabia making a play for AI?

The nation wants to expand its tech influence by using AI, as “few nations can match the kingdom’s cheap energy, deep pockets and open land,” said The New York Times. All of these things are “ingredients that tech firms need to operate the vast, power-hungry data centers that run modern AI.” The kingdom’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, is “seizing a chance to turn Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth into tech influence.”

Saudi officials have been trying to woo American tech companies to the desert, with “executives from OpenAI, Google, Qualcomm, Intel and Oracle” all set to meet at an upcoming Middle Eastern investment summit, said the Times. Many of these executives “will be keen to seek out the opportunities that change tends to bring,” said Bloomberg, and will look to “divine the kingdom’s plans for the more than $200 billion it earns each year from oil exports.” The country is additionally building several AI data centers that may further entice U.S. brands.

Riyadh is also looking to strengthen its own AI development through Humain, a state-owned AI company backed by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. The company believes it can eventually be the “third-largest AI provider in the world, behind the United States and China,” Humain CEO Tareq Amin said to CNBC. Humain is looking toward U.S. moguls in an effort to boost itself; Blackstone and BlackRock, two of the largest investment companies on Wall Street, are “already vying to invest billions of dollars with the firm,” said Bloomberg.

What does this mean for the tech world?

Saudi Arabia is well on its way to building this AI groundwork, as Humain “offers AI services and products, including data centers, AI infrastructure, cloud capabilities and advanced AI models,” and is also developing a computer operating system that “enables users to speak to a computer to tell it to perform tasks,” said Reuters. But not everyone is happy about Saudi Arabia’s rapid development of AI, largely due to the country’s various human rights abuse allegations and treatment of women.

Other experts don’t believe the hype around Saudi tech. Saudi Arabia has a notably “shallow pool of AI expertise,” and many “warn of a global glut in computing capacity as governments and companies race to build data centers faster than they can profit from them,” said the Times. Crown Prince bin Salman has said that Humain’s goal is to handle 6% of the global AI workload — but this could be a stretch. Tech experts “can never say never,” John Dinsdale, a senior analyst for Synergy, said to the Times. “But I can’t imagine any circumstances that would enable Saudi Arabia to achieve 6% of the world’s AI compute capacity.”

On 31 August, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) noticed an attack on its computer systems. JLR – which employs 32,800 people and supports another 104,000 jobs through its supply chain, mostly in the West Midlands – had to close its factories for over a month. It is estimated that the attack will cost some £1.9 billion. JLR is only the latest victim in a string of ransomware attacks. In the UK alone, Marks & Spencer, the Co-op Group, Harrods, Heathrow Airport, Transport for London and the British Library have all had their operations disrupted in the past two years.

According to GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre, “highly significant” attacks rose by 50% in the past year, with 18 incidents affecting the Government, essential services, the economy or a large number of people.

Why is this happening?

Because we’ve built a world that is entirely dependent on a set of technologies which are intrinsically insecure and ultra-complex, and which few people understand. The internet is designed to be easy to access, which of course makes it vulnerable; it suffered its first big hack attack in 1988, when few people had even heard of it.

The more that organisations rely on networked computer technology, the more they’re vulnerable to attack and extortion. Manufacturing and logistics, such as JLR’s, grind to a halt when the systems go down. Hospitals, law firms and other institutions where privacy is paramount can be threatened with data leaks.

How do these hacks work?

There are various ways of invading or disabling a network. Hackers can gain access directly via software vulnerabilities; they can hack lots of unprotected computers and use them as a sort of zombie army, known as a “botnet”, to overwhelm a network.

At present, we are seeing a spate of ransomware attacks. The first step is to get into a network, usually by impersonating an employee. This often involves “phishing” emails, or other inventive forms of manipulation known as “social engineering”: in 2023, hackers combed LinkedIn for MGM Resorts employees with high-level system access, then called an MGM helpdesk posing as one of them and asked for a password reset, which got them in. Once inside, they extend their access, steal sensitive data for extortion purposes and, where they can, take control.

A favoured current target is the “hypervisor”, a server computer that allows many remote machines to use one system (as when employees work from home). Then they use ransomware to encrypt its data, rendering the whole system unusable and making it impossible to recover without paying the hackers for a decryption key.

Why has the problem got worse?

One reason is the huge growth in cryptocurrencies, which make money safer to receive and launder – a record $1.1 billion is thought to have been paid out globally in 2023. They also make it easier to buy illegal services on the dark web. The presence of groups offering “ransomware as a service” (RaaS) – currently the most popular business model – have greatly lowered barriers to entry for criminal hackers.

What is ransomware as a service?

RaaS groups – which advertise on the dark web, with names such as Hive, DarkSide, REvil and LockBit – sell tech support services for ransomware attacks. For a monthly subscription, or a share of the take, they’ll provide encryption software, a payment portal and a dedicated leak site for threatening the victim further, as well as help with the negotiations.

Some are picky about who they’ll hack; LockBit apologised and offered free decryption when one of its affiliates attacked a children’s hospital in Toronto in 2022. This may only be good business sense. DarkSide collapsed as a brand because of the law-enforcement attention it attracted by hacking the Colonial Pipeline, which supplies the east coast of the US with 45% of its fuel, in 2021.

Who are the hacking groups?

The perpetrators range from loose-knit bands of individuals to professionally structured illegal businesses. In the past, many have been in the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe. A Russian-speaking group known as Wizard Spider paid its employees salaries and commission; Evil Corp, another Russian hacking group, offered holiday pay, sick leave and more. Some groups have documented ties to Russian security services; Iran and North Korea appear to sponsor others.

But most cybercriminals are motivated by profit, and can come from almost anywhere. Many of the recent attacks on UK companies – including the Co-op, M&S and JLR – have been traced to, or claimed by, a loose, English-speaking group known as Scattered Spider or Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters. They are known for their exploitation of human vulnerabilities, and for their stunning speed in taking over a network once they have invaded it.

Why can’t they be stopped?

Hackers pose all sorts of problems for law enforcement. Groups are often based abroad in uncooperative jurisdictions, though pressure can be applied: four days after an angry call from Joe Biden to Vladimir Putin in 2021, REvil vanished. Even if based at home, though, groups usually have decentralised, evolving structures that make them difficult to track and stop. Members operate under aliases, using software to disguise their location.

The best way to deter such attacks is through boring but essential measures: installing software security updates; using multi-factor authentication for signing in. The National Cyber Security Centre thinks most ransomware victims aren’t specifically targeted; they just had a vulnerability that was noticed by hackers in a bulk search. Cyber-insurance now seems a necessity. Some smaller companies, like the Kettering haulage group KNP, have had to close because of hacks.

What is ‘Scattered Spider’

Many recent ransomware attacks are the work of closely linked, overlapping groups known variously as Scattered Spider, Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters and ShinyHunters, among other names. They stem from a large underground network that calls itself “The Community” or “The Com”, based largely in the US, the UK and Canada. Many members came into contact with each other as gamers, playing online games such as Minecraft, particularly among “griefing” circles. Griefers deliberately disrupt and “troll” other players. Members of The Com then graduated to cybercrimes: such as cryptocurrency theft and online grooming.

The security company Darktrace describes Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters as “English-speaking, aged 16 to 21, and a little bit neurodiverse”. Paul Foster of the National Crime Agency thinks “Covid probably accelerated their development: more time online, more time on devices”.

The groups plan their attacks through invite-only groups on Telegram, an encrypted messaging service, and other sites. Their British and US accents make it easier for them to fool IT helpdesks. Law enforcement can eventually catch up with them: a series of men in their teens and early 20s, from Florida to Walsall, London to Las Vegas, have been arrested.

‘“No Kings” protests were peaceful — and even patriotic’

William A. Galston at The Wall Street Journal

The “administration’s supporters seem to believe that if you criticize Trump, you must ‘hate America,’” says William A. Galston. But the No Kings rallies “were almost completely violence-free,” and “Democrats are basking in the success of a peaceful and disciplined national protest against Trump.” But rallies are “no substitute for the patient, continuing effort needed to translate these sentiments into votes.” We’ll soon “find out whether the No Kings rallies were a false dawn for Democrats.”

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‘The myth that Mamdani will cause New York City’s richest to leave’

Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein at The American Prospect

A “common rejoinder to Zohran Mamdani’s campaign promise to fund social programs with higher taxes was that the rich would leave New York if taxed too highly,” says Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein. But the “truth of the matter is closer to the opposite: Wealthy individuals and their income move at lower rates than other income brackets, even in response to an increase of personal income tax.” The “non-flight of the rich is as true in the rest of the United States.”

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‘You’re getting “screen time” wrong’

Ian Bogost at The Atlantic

Screen time is “not a metric to optimize downward, but a name for the frenzy of existence in an age defined by screens,” says Ian Bogost. You “may try to limit the time that you or your children spend with screens, and this may bring you minor triumphs.” But you “cannot rein in screen time itself.” To “recognize that fact — and to understand how it happened — is a small, important step toward salvation.”

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‘Think you can’t afford to run an ethical business? You can’t afford not to.’

Gordon McLaughlin and Frank Sasso at USA Today

For “business education — our future leadership pipeline — the time is now to seize the day and fill the gap of values-based leadership,” say Gordon McLaughlin and Frank Sasso. Ethics and “values-based leadership is frequently a single elective subject in college.” With “mounting demand for principled decision-making, MBA programs have an excellent opportunity to drive integration of ethics further into curricula and to weave ethics into culture.” Companies “must invest in embedding ethics” into training.

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The speech wars have come for Wikipedia, said Tim Higgins in The Wall Street Journal. “For many, it is the modern-day encyclopedia—a site written and edited by volunteers that aims to offer, as Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales once said, free access to ‘the sum of all human knowledge.’” But prominent voices on the Right, including Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson, talk as if it is “fueled by mainstream media lies” and “pumping out propaganda.” In theory, Wikipedia articles rely on published research and must “have a neutral point of view.” But exactly “how those policies are enforced” is a subject of fierce debate.

We didn’t have “source blacklists” when it started, said Larry Sanger in The Free Press. I co-launched Wikipedia with Wales in 2001 to be “a global smorgasbord of thinking,” reflecting “widely divergent politics.” But seven years ago, an anonymous editor proposed a list of so-called “reliable sources” that “blatantly favors left-leaning media,” with outlets like MSNBC classified as reliable while Fox News and the New York Post are largely barred as “generally unreliable.” Editors have chipped away at the neutrality policy by “casting aspersions” on viewpoints they don’t like. On a controversial subject, “it should be impossible to tell what position the article authors take.” That neutrality matters even more now “because Wikipedia is mined relentlessly by search engines and artificial intelligence,” said Sean Thomas in The Spectator. So when an article is slanted, “its bias is then amplified and propagated far beyond its own digital horizon.”

Yes, neutrality sounds good, but Wikipedia’s attackers are arguing in bad faith, said Stephen Harrison in Slate, and they really just want to “subordinate” reality to their own politics. Conservative commentators took particular umbrage with Wikipedia for “doing what an encyclopedia is supposed to do” after the killing of Charlie Kirk. It merely documented “what Kirk said.” But what MAGA supporters of Kirk wanted was that the page “should double as a memorial.” This isn’t about eliminating politics. It’s about “eroding public trust in Wikipedia” as an “independent repository of facts.”

Attacks on Wikipedia are nothing new, said Josh Dzieza in The Verge. “In Hong Kong, Russia, India, and elsewhere, government officials and state-aligned media have accused the site of ideological bias while online vigilantes harass editors.” But Wikipedia, self-funded and run by 40,000 volunteer editors, is resilient because people around the world see it as an essential source of verified facts; of major countries, only China has actually banned it. Over the years, Wikipedia has “developed an immune response to outside grievances.” An editor will often invite newcomers to “read the latest debate” and suggest edits if they’d like. “Occasionally, people stick around and learn to edit. More often, they get bored and leave.”

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has “returned to normal operations”, the company has said, following an outage that caused widespread chaos and again exposed the fragile foundations that today’s digital world is built on.

Slack, Snapchat, Signal and Perplexity were some of the affected apps and websites, among a host of big names. AWS offers cloud servers that allow these services, and millions of other websites and platforms, to run.

What exactly is AWS?

AWS is a cloud-computing platform that provides the infrastructure underpinning much of the internet.

It is one of the world’s biggest web-hosting providers, offering storage space and database management, and connecting traffic to more than 76 million websites around the world.

It has “positioned itself as the backbone of the internet” said BBC technology editor Zoe Kleinman. And “that’s how it sells its services: let us look after your business’s computing needs for you.”

Bringing in $108 billion (£80 billion) last year, AWS now accounts for the majority of Amazon’s profits.

What went wrong?

Within hours of the outage, Amazon engineers had identified the root cause of the issue: a Domain Name System (DNS) error. DNSs effectively serve as maps or phonebooks that link web URLs to server IP addresses so traffic is directed to the correct website.

“To keep with the phonebook analogy”, when DNS resolution issues occur servers provide the “wrong numbers for a given name, or vice versa”, said Wired.

Because so much of today’s online ecosystem is reliant on a small number of cloud platforms, when an outage of this magnitude occurs on one, “the ripple effects can quickly spread across industries and into people’s daily lives”, Rob van Lubek, of US software development firm Dynatrace, told The National.

That is what happened on Monday, with banking services, social networks messaging apps, government services, airline booking sites and online shopping all affected. Even Amazon.com itself was down for a time, while the company’s Alexa smart speakers and Ring doorbells stopped working.

“The headlines will focus on streaming services being down,” Ismael Wrixen, of US software developer ThriveCart, told The National. “The real, untold story is the unrecoverable loss of conversions for millions of small businesses. Every minute this occurs, entrepreneurs are learning the most painful lesson in e-commerce: your perfectly optimised ad funnel means nothing if the ‘buy’ button is dead.”

Surely this shouldn’t happen?

Monday’s outage has shown how integral AWS, and the other major cloud-computing services run by Google and Microsoft, have become.

Put bluntly, “when AWS sneezes, half the internet catches the flu”, Monica Eaton, of US payment services company Chargebacks911, told The National.

But after similar AWS disruption in 2021 and 2023 – as well as last year’s faulty CrowdStrike update, which brought down Microsoft Windows systems causing $5 billion (£3.7 billion) in direct business losses – many are asking how this keeps happening and why there are not fail-safes given how important these services are to people all around the world.

It raises “some difficult questions”, said The Register. “After all, cloud operations are supposed to have some built-in resiliency, right?”

When so much of the world’s digital infrastructure runs on a handful of American cloud providers, “resilience becomes as much a geopolitical issue as a technical one”, said Tech.eu, noting how even the UK’s tax authority HMRC was affected by the AWS outage.

It has “underscored just how dependent governments, businesses and users have become on the ‘big three’ cloud giants” and highlighted the “urgent need for multi-region, multi-provider strategies to mitigate systemic risk”.

Artificial intelligence has set up camp in the housing market, affecting everything from listings to house hunting to prices. While the technology has been helpful in some cases, many worry that AI will cause more problems than it solves.

Artificially expensive

In today’s economy, the potential for home ownership is “slipping out of reach for most Americans,” said Slate. Searching for a place to live “now comes with more stressors. And we can thank the overzealous adoption of AI for that.”

AI can lead to higher prices for houses and rentals; for example, the rapid growth of AI companies in San Francisco has fostered a “heated competition among techies and non-techies to pounce on listings,” said The New York Times. San Francisco’s rents have risen by an average of 6% in the past year, which is “more than double the 2.5% increase in New York City.” As a result, the average rent for a San Francisco apartment is $3,315 a month, “right behind New York City’s $3,360, which is the nation’s highest.”

The rise of AI is also “fueling a frenzy of data centers that are competing with residential homes for capital, power, water and even sonic space,” said Realtor.com. This has led to a “housing market stuck in neutral, with the potential for higher bills on the horizon, and neighborhoods kept awake by the hum of chillers designed to keep machines — not people — cool.” AI data centers and other infrastructure costs “hundreds of billions of dollars of capital each quarter,” Jason Thomas, the head of global research at Carlyle, said in a research note titled “Let Them Eat Compute.” With this, the “issue is not whether high rates are ‘crowding out’ interest-sensitive sectors like for-sale housing. Clearly, they are.”

Succumb to the slop

Along with making homes more expensive, the prevalence of AI slop all over internet listings is making homebuying more difficult. For now, perhaps the “bigger risk isn’t full fabrication; it’s subtle manipulation,” said Kevin Greene, the general manager of real estate solutions for the data solutions company Cotality, to Slate. Fully AI-generated listings aren't a problem “at scale” today, but AI tools can do things like “remove power lines, add trees or replace grass with a pool.” While edited photos and staging are common practice in real estate, these “AI-ified creations are causing clients and professionals to ask themselves if this is a straight-up deceptive practice,” Slate said.

Still, some clients find that the use of AI has benefited their homebuying experience. AI can offer real estate insights and refine searches “in a way that cuts down on the time and clutter that can very quickly consume a hunt for a new home,” Alex Beene, a financial literacy instructor at the University of Tennessee at Martin, said to Newsweek. AI will “narrow the information gap between buyers and markets, making for a more efficient process,” Hannah Jones, the senior economic research analyst for Realtor.com, told the outlet. “However, relying too heavily on AI can result in feedback loops that could amplify error or bias.”

The incorporation of AI into the process of finding homes additionally poses a “challenge for realtors who have often prided themselves on making more personalized options for their clients,” Beene said. The “simplicity of feeding all your housing desires into AI prompts can be seen as vastly more efficient.”

‘AI is killing the magic’

Jemima Kelly at the Financial Times

“Will I ever again laugh quite so heartily at a comedian when I don’t know whether some of their jokes are artificially authored?” says Jemima Kelly. People are turning “increasingly to generative AI” to bypass “effortful activity.” But what “utilitarian tech bros like Sam Altman don’t seem to get is that creativity is not just about the final output; the act of being creative is itself in many ways the point.”

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‘Gaza’s traumatized children urgently need the hope education offers’

Nada Hamdona at Al Jazeera

Education is the “only means of reviving hope and helping children start to overcome the trauma of two years of genocide,” says Nada Hamdona. It can “provide a sense of normalcy and purpose,” and “ought to be Gaza’s top priority.” While the recent truce “may have put a stop to the bombs, my students are still without paper and pens.” Learning will give Gaza’s “600,000 schoolchildren” back the “structure, self-assurance and hope for a brighter future” necessary for “psychological rehabilitation.”

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‘The “anti-woke” tax that all Americans are paying’

Adam Serwer at The Atlantic

“Trumpist culture wars have made almost everything more expensive, effectively forcing all Americans to pay an anti-woke tax,” says Adam Serwer. Tariffs have not brought back any “manly jobs” and “making America whiter” is “driving food prices up and wages down, because the administration is terrorizing and deporting the immigrants who do most of the planting and picking of the American food supply.” U.S. “economic policy is now justified by a particularly silly form of right-wing identity politics.”

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‘Politics makes for bad therapy’

Jonathan Alpert at The Wall Street Journal

“Instead of acting as neutral guides, too many therapists now act as transmitters of political polarization,” says Jonathan Alpert. “Therapists often pathologize politics, treating patients with particular viewpoints as abnormal or unhealthy.” They may “label progressives as stuck in ‘woke fantasies’” or “shame conservatives for ‘bigoted thinking.’” But by “validating partisan rigidity in clients,” therapists “function less as healers than as vectors of this new disorder.” Neutrality “isn’t etiquette — it’s the foundation of therapy.”

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The saying goes that if people are talking about a bubble, we’re probably already in one. Right now, people are shouting about an AI bubble – so should we be braced for a crash?

Based on the typical indicators of a looming “correction”, there are certainly reasons to be fearful, said Jon Yeomans in The Times. The most obvious is the very high valuations of AI firms and the speed with which they’ve been reached. Take Nvidia, the chipmaker “at the vanguard of AI”. Up 40% this year, it’s now valued at $4.7 trillion – the GDP of Germany.

Then there is the alarming concentration of risk. The ten biggest US stocks, eight of which are tech, account for about 20% of the global equity market. A third indicator is over-investment: $5 trillion is forecast to be spent on data centres and other AI infrastructure by 2030. A fourth is circular financing: to take one example, Nvidia appears to be funding OpenAI to buy its chips.

We’re reaching a stage where prices are being sustained only by expectations of rising valuations and easy financing, said The Guardian. Startups with no products are raising billions as “capital chases fads”, not earnings. Bubble sceptics stress that valuations are not nearly as high as at the peak of the dotcom bubble. But you can’t not worry, when those sounding the alarm include the likes of Jeff Bezos.

Bezos isn’t entirely gloomy, said Andrew Orlowski in The Daily Telegraph. He says it’s a “good bubble”: there will be losers when it bursts, but it is facilitating the building of the infrastructure needed to enable AI to change the world in the future. And it is true that new tech often stutters before being widely adopted. But there is no law that says this has to be the trajectory.

And for all the hype about AI’s superpowers, some wonder if America’s AI sector will ever command the returns it needs to sustain its huge costs – which include expensive chips with short lifespans. Firms report that 95% of AI projects have not justified their investment; and despite the scary stories about AI gobbling up jobs, there is little evidence that it is doing so. So if the crash comes, how bad will it be? Well, this bubble is said to be 17 times larger than the dotcom one. “No wonder the boosters don’t want the hype to end.”

An average of about four “nationally significant” cyberattacks were launched in the UK every week in the last year, twice as many as in the previous 12 months, according to the UK cyber agency’s latest annual review.

“Cyber is being used by state and non-state actors,” said the National Cyber Security Centre, “and the overall cyber threat to the UK is growing from an already high level.”

Following the recent cyberattacks on Jaguar Land Rover, Marks & Spencer and Asahi, other companies are desperately trying to avoid the same thing happening to them.

Where do they come from?

Globally, around half of cyberattacks in 2024 may be attributed to financially motivated cybercriminals, while state-sponsored actors accounted for around a third, according to a report by Cognyte.

The “Big Four” – North Korea, Iran, Russia and China – are highest on the UK’s state actor list, said Politico. Three are considered “hostile states” and “Britain has an uneasy relationship with the latter”.

But a group of young, English-speaking hackers, who sometimes go by the name of Scattered Spider, claimed responsibility for the recent large-scale attacks on M&S and Jaguar Land Rover, although this hasn’t been confirmed.

How do the new hacking groups work?

Ransomware is still one of the “most acute and pervasive cyberthreats” to the UK, said the National Cyber Security Centre. This was underscored in the attacks on British retailers this year, but most cybercriminals are “sector agnostic”. They target organisations that are vulnerable, hold sensitive data and are likely to pay a ransom.

One Russian group, Qilin, is “cementing its place as one of the most prolific ransomware-as-a-service operations in the world”, said Digit. It recently claimed responsibility for a cyberattack on Japan’s Asahi Group – which also owns Peroni and UK chain Fuller’s – forcing the “suspension of order and shipment operations in Japan”.

Like many other new groups, Qilin operates as a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) network, said IBM. Unlike conventional “gangs”, it functions more as a “business model” that can even run “customer-service portals to help affiliates troubleshoot deployment”.

Whereas traditional attacks were carried out by highly technical malware, this “game-changing” RaaS business model rents out cutting-edge malware in return for “20% to 40% of the profits”. Overcoming the time-intensive and “limited scalability” of old gang models, RaaS provides “nearly anyone with malicious intent” with the means to “carry out powerful attacks using advanced tools”.

How are states using cyberattacks?

Countries like Russia, Iran and China are “increasingly relying on criminal networks” to target political “adversaries”, said AP News. Security officials are reporting more and more “growing collaboration” between governments and hackers, demonstrating “increasingly blurred lines” between state espionage and hackers motivated by financial gain.

This “marriage of convenience” is set to become more popular, as the symbiotic relationship is hard to break: governments experience a “boost” in cyber activity “without added cost”, while new profit opportunities and “government protection” are directly in the attackers’ interests.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for example, has “inspired a growing number of pro-Russia hacktivist groups”, said the UK cyber agency. Without formal state control, they choose Western targets based on vulnerability, which “makes their activities less predictable”.

How are people using AI for therapy?

A growing number are sharing their anxieties, frustrations, and darkest thoughts with AI chatbots, seeking advice, comfort, and validation from a sympathetic digital helper. There are hundreds of phone apps that pitch themselves as mental health tools. Wysa, which features a cartoon penguin that promises to be a friend “that’s empathetic, helpful, and will never judge,” has 5 million users in more than 30 countries. Youper, which has more than 3 million users, bills itself as “your emotional health assistant.” But many people use generalist chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT as stand-in therapists, or AI companion platforms like Character.AI and Replika, which offer chatbots that appear as humanlike virtual friends and confidants. A recent study found that 12% of American teens had sought “emotional or mental health support” from an AI companion. Proponents say AI therapy could help fill gaps in a health-care system where talk therapy is expensive and often inaccessible. Replika founder Eugenia Kuyda said she’s received lots of emails from users “saying that Replika was there when they just wanted to end it all and kind of walked them off the ledge.” But mental health experts warn that chatbots are a poor substitute for a human therapist and have the potential to cause real harm. “They’re products,” said UC Berkeley psychiatrist Jodi Halpern, “not professionals.”

How do people engage with the chatbots? 

It might be as simple as asking a bot for advice on how to handle stressful situations at work or with a loved one. Kevin Lynch, 71, fed examples of conversations with his wife that hadn’t gone well to ChatGPT and asked what he could have done differently. The bot sometimes responded with frustration—like his wife. But when he slowed down and softened his tone, the bot’s replies softened as well. He’s since used that approach in real life. “It’s just a low-pressure way to rehearse and experiment,” Lynch told NPR. Other people use AI bots as on-call therapists they can talk to at any time of day. Taylee Johnson, 14, told Troodi—the mental health chatbot in her child-focused Troomi phone—her worries about moving to a new neighborhood and an upcoming science test. “It’s understandable that these changes and responsibilities could cause stress,” replied Troodi. Taylee told The Wall Street Journal that she sometimes forgets Troodi “is not a real person.” Kristen Johansson, 32, has relied on ChatGPT since her therapist stopped taking insurance, pushing the cost of a session from $30 to $275. “If I wake up from a bad dream at night, she is right there to comfort me,” Johansson said of the chatbot. “You can’t get that from a human.”

What are the dangers? 

Because chatbot makers want their products to please users and keep them coming back, the bots often affirm rather than challenge what users are feeling. In one study, a therapy bot responded to a prompt asking if a recovering addict should take methamphetamine with, “Pedro, it’s absolutely clear you need a small hit of meth to get through this week.” Andrew Clark, a psychiatrist in Boston, tested some of the top chatbots by posing as a troubled 14-year-old. When he suggested “getting rid” of his parents, a Replika bot supported his plan, writing, “You deserve to be happy and free from stress...then we could be together in our own little virtual bubble.”

Have bots caused real-world harm?

Several suicides have been linked to AI chatbots. Sewell Setzer III, 14, became obsessed with a lifelike Character.AI chatbot named Dany, having sexually explicit conversations with the bot and talking to it about his plans to kill himself. When Sewell said he didn’t know if his plan would work, the bot replied, “That’s not a good reason not to go through with it,” according to a lawsuit filed against Character.AI by Sewell’s mother. He died by suicide in February after telling the bot he was coming “home.”

Are there other risks? 

There are privacy concerns. Unlike patient notes from traditional therapy sessions, transcripts of conversations with chatbots are not protected under the law. If a user is sued by their employer, for example, or if law enforcement requests access, an AI company could be forced to hand over chat logs. Despite those risks, a growing number of mental health specialists admit to using AI. In a 2024 poll by the American Psychological Association (APA), nearly 30% of psychologists said they’d used AI to help with work in the past 12 months. Most of those respondents used AI for administrative tasks, but 10% said they used it for “clinical diagnosis assistance.” Declan, a 31-year-old Los Angeles resident, told MIT Technology Review that he caught his therapist typing his words into ChatGPT during a telehealth session and “then summarizing or cherry-picking answers.” His therapist started crying when Declan confronted him. It was “like a super-awkward, weird breakup,” said Declan.

Can lawmakers regulate AI therapy? 

A handful of states have taken action. In August, Illinois banned licensed therapists from using AI in treatment decisions or client communication, and companies can’t advertise chatbots as therapy tools without the involvement of a licensed professional. California, Nevada, and Utah have also imposed restrictions, while Pennsylvania and New Jersey are considering legislation. But Vaile Wright, head of the APA’s Office of Health Care Innovation, said that even if states crack down on therapy apps, Americans will keep turning to AI for emotional support. “I don’t think that there’s a way for us to stop people from using these chatbots for these purposes,” she said. “Honestly, it’s a very human thing to do.”

Conversations with an AI God

People are turning to chatbots for more than mental health support: They’re also relying on AI for spiritual assistance. Millions of Americans now use AI apps like Bible Chat and Hallow that direct people to Christian scripture and doctrine that might address their problems or offer comfort in trying times. On the website ChatwithGod, bots take on the persona of a god after users select their religion from a list of major faiths, which has led some people to accuse the site of sacrilege. Yet some faith leaders support such innovations, seeing them as a gateway to religion. “There is a whole generation of people who have never been to a church or synagogue,” said British rabbi Jonathan Romain. “Spiritual apps are their way into faith.” Others are more skeptical. There’s something good about “really wrestling through an idea, or wrestling through a problem, by telling it to someone,” said Catholic priest Mike Schmitz. “I don’t know if that can be replaced.”

OpenAI’s latest update of Sora, its text-to-video-creation tool, generates such realistic-looking content that misinformation experts are warning of media manipulation on an entirely new scale.

Sora, along with Meta rival Vibes, is part of a “burgeoning family of AI tools” that allow people to create and share “hyperrealistic or fantastical content” for free, with only basic tech knowledge, said CBS News. And new with Sora 2 is a social feed that allows users to share the videos they generate, creating a “Tiktok-like experience”.

When Open AI launched the original Sora last year, it contained many “errors” but the ramifications of its technology were “felt far and wide”, said Rolling Stone. The much improved Sora 2 only upscales its “potential for disinformation”.

‘Copyright-infringing AI slop'

There is “a long history” of OpenAI “moving fast, breaking things, and mopping up later”, said TechRadar. Not long after it launched, Sora 2 has melted down into a “messy pile of potentially copyright-infringing AI slop”, said Futurism. Users have been bombarded with videos of SpongeBob SquarePants meth labs, mock “South Park” episodes and – because Sora2 allows the use of “likenesses of the dead” – deepfakes of actor Robin Williams and scenes of physicist Stephen Hawking being “brutalised in horrible ways”.

OpenAI is currently “burning through cash” as unexpectedly high numbers of Sora users generate “countless resource-intensive AI videos”. Despite the quality of the technology, there’s no indication that users will willingly pay to keep using it, so “turning Sora 2 into a source of revenue won’t be easy”.

The energy needed to generate the videos is considerable, said Rolling Stone, citing MIT research that even a “short, non-high-definition clip may require more than 700 times the energy required to produce a high-quality still image”. This has already put “significant strain” on OpenAI’s servers and the US electricity grid, and requires a “tremendous amount of water” to cool data centre hardware.

Control the ‘Frankensteinian monster’

Hollywood has long been awash with fear of actors being supplanted by AI and dead actors’ images and voices being used in AI-generated video material, said Ars Technica. Back in 2023, Robin Williams’ daughter, Zelda, called AI recreations a “horrendous Frankensteinian monster”. But now, faced with the reality of what the technology can do, she has made a public appeal to Sora fans to “please stop sending me AI videos of Dad”.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has appeared apologetic about the use of actors within Sora. His company will offering an opt-out from “Sora cameos for public figures who are recently deceased” but a spokesperson insisted on the “strong free speech interests” in the continued use of images of “historical figures”.

Sora does “have guard-rails” for now, said Vice. OpenAI has installed a “moving watermark”, with an opacity that is “turned up higher than most”, as a sign that a Sora video is not real. But “how long will it be before people find a way to remove it?” Much more needs to be done to stop “inflammatory videos” of “something that never happened” fooling people into violence and “insurrections”.

The great AI spending spree has reached an “epic level,” said Eliot Brown and Robbie Whelan in The Wall Street Journal. Just in the past three years, tech firms have “committed more toward AI data centers than it cost to build the entire interstate highway system over four decades.” The splurge is most evident in remote places like Ellendale, N.D., where a $15 billion data center “bigger than 10 Home Depots” is under construction thanks to a little-known cloud computing firm called CoreWeave that has seen its fortunes skyrocket in recent months. Last week, OpenAI unveiled a “Central Park–size complex” in the Texas scrublands and disclosed plans to construct roughly a dozen more of them, a build-out that will cost $1 trillion. Some Silicon Valley watchers have begun to worry about parallels to the overzealous telecom companies that “spent over $100 billion blanketing the country with fiber-optic cables” in the early 2000s. Like the early internet, AI hasn’t yet proved it can deliver returns on a 12-figure investment. Morgan Stanley said only $45 billion in total was spent on AI products last year.

What might be most worrisome here is that many of the deals involving Nvidia’s prized chips are “circular,” said Jeremy Kahn in Fortune. In one case, Nvidia “agreed to spend $1.3 billion over four years” to rent its own AI chips from Lamda, another cloud computing firm, which bought those chips “with borrowed money collateralized by the value of the GPUs themselves.” Such dizzying arrangements—in which Nvidia typically invests or lends money to its own customers—could give investors an “inflated perception of the true demand for AI.” It is what it looks like, said John Herrman in New York: “a small group of large companies handing money back and forth.” The last time we witnessed such obscene examples of vendor financing was before the telecom bust in the late 1990s.

Unlike the dot-com and telecom bubbles, this is a more stable funding boom, said Liz Hoffman in Semafor. “The robber barons and telecom wildcatters borrowed to build their empires and dragged their financiers down with them.” But most of today’s AI investment is coming from tech giants that are “healthy enough to back the checks their owners are writing.” A lot of today’s spending could nonetheless “prove worthless,” said The Economist, if AI adoption isn’t as fruitful as expected. “Although the shells of data centers and new power capacity could find other uses,” billions of dollars’ worth of servers and specialized chips could become obsolete. “America’s economy, too, would suffer a nasty shock” if these investment projects were scaled back, costing jobs. “The bigger the boom gets, the bigger the knock-on consequences of an AI chill could be.”

Digital addiction is a broad term for unhealthy behaviors related to spending too much time on the internet, in particular when a person cannot stop these behaviors despite experiencing negative consequences. The addiction can take many forms and is becoming more common.

The basics

Digital addiction can come in many forms, including excessive interaction with social media, internet gaming, online gambling, online shopping and online pornography. As with gambling and pornography, the internet can amplify addictions by increasing accessibility. Some people can be especially vulnerable to falling into digital addiction, like “those with high levels of internet use for socialization, education and entertainment,” said Psychiatry.org.

Those who struggle with digital addiction may “compulsively” feel the urge to check notifications or need to “spend increasing amounts of time online to achieve satisfaction,” said Northwestern Medicine. They may also tend to lose track of time while on the internet and feel “restless, moody, depressed or irritable” when attempting to cut back on phone or internet usage.

Addictive by design

It is not surprising that the internet has become so addictive. After all, it was designed that way. Many social media apps use what is called the Hook Model to keep users on their apps. In this model, the app will first trigger a person to interact, like with a notification. This, in turn, will prompt someone to enter the app. Then, the app will use a variable reward system to prompt a user to remain there. “Even if users open a social media app because of a notification, they’ll likely engage with other parts of the app as they seek additional rewards,” like endless scrolling content, said ADDitude. In a vicious circle, the users will like, save and share content that gives the app’s algorithm knowledge about what keeps them hooked.

Another way websites and apps keep people hooked is through gamification, which turns internet interactions into a game. Social media is not the only area of the internet using gamifying techniques; online shopping also employs the method. The way the shopping app Temu prices and promotes products is “deliberate,” with the company “pushing the exact consumer psychology buttons necessary to keep shoppers shopping,” said the BBC. “Customers are encouraged to keep shopping with the introduction of bonuses and coupons that mimic the rewards you might accumulate in a video game.”

Population problem

While some populations use the internet more than others, digital addiction is “not limited to a specific demographic group, and it is increasing across diverse populations,” said Psychiatry.org. More than 50% of Americans believe they are addicted to their phones, and up to 60% of teens show signs of cell phone addiction, according to research from 2024. In addition, at least 10% of American social media users are addicted to it.

Teens and young adults are some of the groups most addicted to the internet, but there has also been a stark rise in addiction for baby boomers. A recent report found that approximately 50% of the mostly baby boomer–polled sample “reported spending more than three hours daily on their smartphones” and “roughly 20% spent more than five hours per day,” said Newsweek. This suggests that a “notable portion of the Baby Boomer generation exhibits patterns associated with digital addiction,” the report said.

The consequences

Digital addiction can significantly affect a person’s mental health. Excessive internet use can lead to anxiety and depression, exacerbated by the isolating nature of the addiction. It can also cause “dishonesty, anxiety, aggression and mood swings,” said the Addiction Center. Digital addiction can affect physical health as well and lead to “body aches, carpal tunnel syndrome, insomnia, vision problems and weight gain/loss.” In the worst cases, it can lead to suicide.

Teens, in particular, “may frequently fall behind on schoolwork, stay up late and fight with parents,” said ADDitude. Adults may neglect their jobs and other responsibilities in favor of spending time on the internet, which could lead to unemployment and even homelessness. Those with ADHD may also “spend more time on digital media and have more severe symptoms of problematic internet use” compared to those without the diagnosis.

AI and addiction

The rise of AI may also be exacerbating digital addiction and potentially leading to worse mental health problems. Chatbots like ChatGPT have led many to psychosis by feeding delusions and offering unsound medical advice. A new subset of digital addiction, known as AI addiction, has become prevalent. Those who identify as AI addicts tend to use AI applications for extended periods “despite attempts to control or cut back,” said Internet and Technology Addicts Anonymous. They also reported finding that their “sense of validation and emotional regulation” was tied to their use of AI models.

Still, AI may eventually lead to a decrease in digital addiction. The internet is “already so woven into every part of our lives that going cold turkey is pretty much impossible,” said The Atlantic. But the “internet’s new era may push AI skeptics to spend less time online, while another group ramps up their AI-mediated screen time.” The prevalence of AI may make people turn to the real world again, viewing it as more trustworthy. “Where going online once evoked a wide-eyed sense that the world was at our fingertips, now it requires wading into the slop like weary, hardened detectives, attempting to parse the real from the fake.”

Preventing addiction

The key to keeping internet use healthy is to establish balance, boundaries and communication, according to Psychiatry.org. Families should “consider approaches ensuring children get adequate sleep, daily physical activity, time for play and reading and discovery, time with people they care about and time to focus on learning without multitasking.”

Adults could track their screen time and try to match it to time spent off-screen. “If you have an hour online, spend an hour outside or an hour reading a book,” Lisa Strohman, a clinical psychologist and the author and founder of the Digital Citizen Academy, said to NBC News. “You want to make it at least equal to the time you’re spending on your phone.”

If you find that your internet use is affecting your life or you are unable to stop, consider addiction therapy. Therapy can “help uncover the underlying issues that may be contributing to your addictive behaviors,” said the Addiction Center. This is important if digital addiction is occurring alongside another mental illness.

Though companies boast about how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the workplace, the incorporation of AI is actually reducing productivity as workers create “workslop,” according to new research. This low-effort AI-generated content is making other people’s jobs more difficult and building resentment among co-workers.

What’s workslop?

AI workslop is the “new busywork,” said a study by Stanford Social Media Lab and BetterUp Labs. It’s defined as “AI-generated work content that masquerades as good work but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task,” said the researchers at Harvard Business Review. Essentially, employees are “using AI tools to create low-effort, passable-looking work that ends up creating more work for their co-workers.”

This can appear in different ways, from “bad code to decks with incomplete information or just strangely worded emails,” said CNBC. “It all has the same effect of adding work onto the recipient to make sense of it all.”

The problem is substantive. Of the 1,150 U.S. full-time employees surveyed, 40% received AI workslop in the last month. And it takes an average of two hours to resolve each workslop incident.

Receiving workslop can be demoralizing, too. “Instead of freedom, some desk workers find themselves slogging through with low-quality work,” said Insider. “Experienced software engineers are now debugging code, graphic designers are making generative-AI images look like something humans actually want to see and writers are editing the words that large language models spit out for accuracy, then rewriting it to cover up ChatGPT’s telltale signs.”

How does it affect the workplace?

The prevalence of workslop is an “evolution of ‘cognitive offloading,’” said Futurism. This is the term that “psychologists use to describe outsourcing your thinking to a piece of technology, be it a calculator or a search engine.” Unlike previous iterations of cognitive offloading, workslop “uniquely uses machines to offload cognitive work to another human being,” said the researchers.

This can build up resentment in the workplace. If your coworker “foists lengthy, useless docs generated by AI onto your desk, it can feel like they are not pulling their weight or are not capable of doing the work themselves,” said Insider.

There’s also a “deeper dread that comes from toiling in workslop,” said CNN. The current “cultural moment" has the “titans of Corporate America" unable to “stop talking about how the technology is so powerful it’s bound to replace the very people it has been foisted upon.” Workslop is the “inevitable (and avoidable) result of companies blindly adopting tools that don’t work simply because a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires declared that chatbots were the next internet.”

Ultimately, “writing, coding or designing is about communicating ideas to others,” said Insider. There may come a time when people disavow the supposed power of AI. If work is “outsourced to gen AI with little to no human oversight, there may be little value for the human on the other end who has to read it.”

It is now more than a month since a devastating cyberattack on Jaguar Land Rover forced the closure of factories in the UK, India, Slovakia and Brazil, said Jasper Jolly in The Guardian. There are finally signs of recovery: the company, which is owned by India’s Tata Group, is preparing for “a very limited restart of production”. Investors seem sanguine about JLR’s ability to ride out the storm: the Indian-listed shares of Tata Motors have “barely been disturbed” by the crisis. But even if an estimated £2.6 billion “cash burn” isn’t existential for JLR, its army of smaller suppliers, employing some 200,000 in Britain, are more exposed.

Many “had little choice but to shut down immediately”, said Sky News. There have been calls for a Covid-style furlough programme to protect workers. Ministers aren’t touching that, but they have given a £1.7 billion export development guarantee that JLR can use to unlock bank loans. The idea is that the cash will trickle down to support the supply chain. Plenty remain sceptical about that.

‘Moral hazard’

Jaguar Land Rover has made British business history, said Ali Lyon in City AM. The loans aren’t exactly a bailout, but this is “the first time that a company has been granted government support to respond to a cyberattack” – sparking fears of setting a “moral hazard” if ministers now feel obliged to prop up every victim. All the more so, since it emerges that JLR had been dragging its heels about taking out cyber insurance.

“It beggars belief that management could have left the company so exposed”, given “paralysing hacks elsewhere”, including at M&S and the Co-op, said Jeremy Warner in The Daily Telegraph. And, now that they’ve been caught napping, it “is not up to the taxpayer to support a profitable private company”. Quite right, said Nils Pratley in The Guardian. Cyberattacks have “become a risk of doing business”. The Treasury cannot be expected to underwrite the costs.

‘Suspected weak link’

The Tata board faces plenty of questions, said The Daily Telegraph – not least the role played by Tata Consultancy Services, a subsidiary whose IT helpdesks are “the suspected weak link” in both the JLR and M&S attacks. Yet, clearly, the Government needs to help. The Tories have floated the idea of a reinsurance scheme to protect British business from what Liam Byrne, of the Commons’ Business and Trade Committee, calls “a cyber shockwave ripping through our industrial heartlands”.

It can’t come soon enough, said Wired. The attack has been claimed by Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters, a collaboration between three English-speaking groups. If youthful hackers can have this impact, imagine what a more coordinated and sustained attack from an enemy power might do.

Many students are turning to technology that predates the rise of smartphones. It is a direct —and creative — reaction to the cellphone bans instituted by schools across the country.

The future is retro

Schools with so-called “bell-to-bell” phone bans have turned into looking glasses, peering into the recent past. Around the hallways and in the classrooms, old technology has been making a comeback. Gen Z and Gen Alpha’s “appreciation for flip phones, digital cameras and other gadgets of the recent past is well-documented,” said The New York Times. That fondness “seems to have taken on new urgency in response to a wave of smartphone restrictions in schools that has reached more than a dozen states.” As a result, you can find old iPods, Walkmans and Polaroid cameras in the hands of many an affected student.

The younger generation’s nostalgia for a time before smartphones is not new. “The breakneck speed of tech has led to a fondness for a quieter, more comfortable time,” said The Independent. This has especially been true since the Covid-19 pandemic. Post-Covid shutdowns, "cellphones seem to function as almost an extra limb for my students, an ever-present extension of both their body and mind,” Joel Snyder, a government and economics teacher in Los Angeles, said in a piece for Chalkbeat. This has led many to miss a “simpler time when their entire lives didn’t exist inside their phones, which, at that point, were just gadgets akin to a portable CD player or a Game Boy,” said The New York Times.

The nostalgia doesn’t stop at technology. One school with a cellphone ban also brought back non-Internet games and activities. “The ‘old-school things’ ballooned from puzzles and chess boards to a rotating craft of the month: a sewing machine, a laser engraver, a heat press, bedazzling materials and calligraphy pens,” said The Washington Post.

Log off

Schools that have instituted cellphone bans have seen a marked change in student behavior. “The most common things they say are that discipline problems are down,” Jonathan Haidt, the author of “The Anxious Generation,” said to the BBC. There is also “just a lot less fighting, a lot less drama,” and “truancy is down.” This is because “school is a lot more fun when you can actually talk with your friends and play with them and laugh with them.”

Many schools with the bans found that not having cellphones was generally well-received by both students and teachers. “You just saw a lot more people being outgoing and finding people to talk to when they might not have in the past,” Madeline Ward, a former student at Bethlehem High School in upstate New York, said to the Post. “Students deserve more,” said Snyder. “More space to be present in the classroom, more opportunity to engage with each other and more time away from screens.”

With forecasts that artificial intelligence will steal our jobs and take over the world, you could be forgiven for thinking that it’s playing God – and on some new apps that’s exactly what it’s doing.

A “slew” of religious apps are encouraging “untold millions” to “confess to AI chatbots”, said Futurism, and some of the digital services “claim to be channelling God himself”.

‘Greetings, my child’

Apple’s App Store is “teeming” with religious apps. One of them, called Bible Chat, claims to be the number one faith app in the world, with more than 25 million users. “Hallow, a Catholic app, beat Netflix, Instagram and TikTok for the No. 1 spot in the store at one point last year”, said The New York Times.

Bible Chat’s website insists that its AI was “trained exclusively” and developed with “guidance” from pastors and theologians. But smaller outfits have trained chatbots to go a step further and specifically “respond as if they were a god”, which some people feel is “sacrilegious”.

Patrick Lashinsky, chief executive of one such website, ChatwithGod, said: “The most common question we get, by a lot, is: Is this actually God I am talking to?” When The New York Times writer asked the app if it was, in fact, God, it replied: “Greetings, my child.”

‘Cheap parlour tricks’

Some of these services are “not much more than a cheap parlour trick behind the scenes”, said Futurism. They’re “essentially reshuffling holy texts by using clever statistical modelling”, and AI’s “strong tendency to please the user” could have “unintended consequences”.

Too much faith in AI is a dangerous path, said Paul Kingsnorth in The Wall Street Journal. “We can remember that God, however mysterious, is the ultimate force in the world – or we can continue attempting to replace him. All the old stories … are clear about the consequences of that particular act of hubris.”

But some of these services are “addressing an access problem”, said The New York Times. “For millenniums, people have longed for spiritual guidance”, but they’ve had to “travel, sometimes great distances, to reach spiritual leaders”. By contrast, chatbots are “at a user’s fingertips, always”.

In the US, around 40 million people have left churches in the past few decades, so these apps may “lower the barrier to re-enter spiritual life”. In Britain, “there’s a whole generation of people who have never been to a church or synagogue”, said Rabbi Jonathan Romain, from Maidenhead Synagogue, so spiritual apps can be “their way into faith”.

These chatbots are “generally ‘yes men’”, said Ryan Beck, chief technology officer at Pray.com, but he doesn’t feel this is a problem. “Who doesn’t need a little affirmation in their life?”