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Against all odds, the US economy continues to grow at a record-setting pace. Yet as new economic data shows, that growth is anything but healthy, and predicated almost entirely on the AI boom.A new essay by podcaster and writer Derek Thompson takes a look at key economic metrics surrounding AI in 2026. Among the most striking is a bar graph showing growth in construction spending, a key indicator of economic stability.Using data from Harvard Kennedy School economist Jason Furman, Thompson shows that growth in data center construction has exploded this year, while all but one other category has regressed.By the…

Even female AI agents appear to get paid less than their male counterparts.Researchers from the University of Limerick in Ireland found that gender bias in the workplace still persists in how people interact with AI models, leading to female presenting chatbots to receive less pay, they report in a study published in the journal Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction which will be presented at an upcoming conference.In experiments, the researchers had 189 participants work in a virtual reality office place and instructed them to complete work-related tasks with a variety of AI assistants, including those that were either…

At this point, the suits at Tesla probably figure their public image can’t get much worse.According to new reporting by SFGate, the Tesla’s factory in Freemont, California is planning a thirteenfold increase of heavy metal particles into the surrounding area. Besides the massive residential population nearby, there’s another glaring problem with the company’s plans: an elementary school right next door.As parents of children attending the Lila Bringhurst Elementary School told SFGate, the Bay Area Air District — the local government agency in charge of regulating air quality — issued a vague and wishy-washy memo meant to inform them of the planned…

Over a century ago, in 1904, a necrotrophic fungus known as chestnut blight swept across North America, brought across the Pacific on the back of chestnut trees from Japan and China.With no natural resistance to the fungal scourge, the once-plentiful chestnut trees of North America were ravaged, killing an estimated 4 billion across the United States alone. Today, all that remains of naturally occurring American chestnut trees are stumps, whose sproutlings never reach maturity.While horticulturists have developed some blight-resistant hybrids to keep the species technically alive, fully mature groves remain incredibly rare — with fewer than 4,300 acres of fruit-producing chestnut trees…

A senator who once fought against the proliferation of prediction markets before they took off in popularity has done a complete U-turn by becoming a lobbyist for gambling platform Kalshi.As Ars Technica reports, former senator Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) perfectly predicted the rise of prediction markets in 2010, years before companies like Kalshi and Polymarket took off.“It would be quite easy to construct an event contract around sporting events such as the Super Bowl, the Kentucky Derby, and Masters golf tournament,” Lincoln warned her fellow lawmakers at the time. “These types of contracts would not serve any real commercial purpose. Rather,…

The overly-serious eggheads at Anthropic are adamant that they’ve “solved” a problem that’s been plaguing humankind since time immemorial: humor.At least, that’s according to former employee Jacob Coxon, best known as the guy who quit Anthropic and claimed that the AI industry was “gambling with our lives.”In a new interview with New York Magazine, Coxon recalled some of the “groupthink dynamics” he saw taking hold at Anthropic and how they made him feel, at times, like the odd man out.“When I first joined, there was a Slack channel with a Claude that had been trained to solve humor,” he said.…

Apple hasn’t exactly impressed with its AI offerings. And privacy-minded Mac users were even less compelled by the company’s decision, with macOS 27, to remove a setting that allowed you to disable and delete its Apple Intelligence features.But never count an annoyed userbase out. As spotted by MacRumors, someone’s created a new open-source tool that allows Mac users to nuke every trace of Apple’s borderline useless AI models from their machines — and it’s already making waves in the Mac community.The tool, called RemoveMacAI, disables Siri, Writing Tools, Genmoji, Image Playground, and the ChatGPT Extension, the developer explained in a…

On Thursday, news that ChatGPT maker OpenAI was set to miss its annual revenue goal by a cool $20 billion sent stock markets into a tailspin. The tech-heavy Nasdaq index took the heaviest hit, falling 1.25 percent by the close of trading.Of course, the stock market happily bounced back to a near-record high as soon as the markets opened on Friday, but the whole episode underscores how fragile the AI spending boom really is — and how little information we truly have from private AI labs which have no obligation to keep the public up to speed.Perhaps jolted by the…

Ever since the Supreme Court overturned a nationwide sports betting ban in 2018, gambling has taken off in the United States. Enabled by popular apps, the practice has become a common fixture in daily life amid an inescapable barrage of advertisements urging users to start gambling away their hard-earned cash.The rise of prediction platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi, which allow users to bet on the outcomes of practically any type of event, has accelerated the trend even further, triggering what experts are warning is a massive increase in gambling addiction.And now, it turns out that even the National Council on…

Despite spending billions of dollars to automate its warehouses, Walmart is seriously struggling to make even the simplest of robots work.As the Wall Street Journal reports, even something as straightforward as removing an object from a cardboard box to package it for customers is proving exceedingly challenging. After hiring several robotics companies, Walmart ultimately settled on small robots with wheels for over a dozen of its warehouses.But the small robots are still unable to remove larger and heavier objects, like bags of dog food. They also break down often, showing that despite plenty of pressure to replace human workers, companies…