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AI is obviously ruining everything on the internet, but so are AI scrapers. They vacuum up everyone’s content up without permission. They put a huge strain on servers. It’s getting rarer and rarer to be able to type a URL in, hit enter, and actually reach the website you’re looking for without encountering a screen that asks you to prove you’re human, wasting precious seconds of your life.Thankfully, a team of designers are working to stick it to the scrapers by throwing a wrench into their works — that wrench being a fiendishly difficult-to-digest font.As spotted by Ars Technica, the…

If this isn’t an indictment on America’s hatred of Flock cameras, we don’t know what is.On Wednesday, a grand jury in Ohio refused to bring felony charges against a Clermont County man accused of destroying a Flock automatic license plate reader (ALPR). In June, police in the Cincinnati suburb of Union Township arrested Cody Morelock, accusing him of removing bolts on the ALPR pole, toppling it over, and ultimately destroying the surveillance camera and its solar panel. The prosecution’s case seemed iron-clad: according to Cincinnati’s Local12, police identified Morelock using surveillance footage from multiple nearby cameras, combined with info gleamed…

Forget AI taking our jobs. We might have to start worrying about robots surpassing us in slapstick humor instead.In a video taken of the practice runs at China’s World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, one of these robots sprints down a race track at an impressive pace, before crashing and literally flaming out in spectacular fashion.Deceleration, it turned out, proved not to be its strong suit. Still going at top speed well after bursting past the finish line, the gangly machine slams into a cushioned wall, stumbles backwards as it desperately tries to regain its balance with rapid footsteps, and…

Since neuroscientists began excavating the human mind in search of the root cause of consciousness, they’ve acting on one foundational assumption — that consciousness is a function of the brain. It’s highly intuitive: we’re conscious, while rocks and dirt and other inanimate matter don’t seem to be.However, one researcher is flipping that assumption on its head. At a neuroscience symposium in Portugal, Allen Institute neuroscientist Christof Koch made a brave challenge — that consciousness might actually be a natural quality of the universe, rather than a product of gray matter.In a new unpublished essay viewed by ScienceAlert, Koch basically asserts…

In theory, the AI industry should have a very attractive story for the public: automate away drudgery and free everyone up to do the things they really love.In practice, they’ve bungled that layup narrative in favor of alternate fearmongering and out-of-touch outbursts that have alienated an incredible chunk of the population. And, crucially, public sentiment seems to be moving in exactly the wrong direction. The more Americans find out about the tech’s effects on the environment, the labor market, creativity, and human connection, the more they want it out of their lives.According to a new poll by the Pew Research…

Earlier in August, the Associated Press broke the news that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement planned to spend upwards of $20 million dollars to acquire thousands of electric-shock gloves. Dubbed the “Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter,” or G.L.O.V.E, the ominously-named devices deliver a painful electric shock meant to immobilize anybody at the mere flick of a wrist.And though the gloves might be new to most of the American public, they’re certainly not new to local cops, who it turns out are just as likely to use them on vulnerable high school students as they are on violent adult suspects.In Omaha,…

Flock Safety is seriously struggling to beat the allegations of enabling a dystopian surveillance state.The company has been reeling from a growing PR crisis, with a growing number of Americans vandalizing its flawed license plate-reading cameras. It’s been losing dozens of contracts with cities across the country as the controversy grows, undermining its value to police.And now, while simultaneously promising to address glaring privacy concerns with milquetoast software updates, Flock is doubling down by selling “Drone as First Responder” (DFR) tech, in the form of drones that are equipped with powerful cameras that can inspect license plate numbers from up…

As the backlash against data centers mounts, American political strategists are scrambling to balance immense public sentiment against the facilities with their obligation to big business.In the Republican Party’s Senate campaign arm, a recently leaked memo exposes just how deep the anxieties go. First reported by Axios, the private document was addressed to major AI companies, warning that the public’s disgust with data centers could ruin the party’s hopes at a pivotal seat in the Senate.The memo addresses the Democratic campaign to unseat Ohio Senator Jon Husted, who filled the hole left when JD Vance ascended to the Vice Presidency.…

The human brain takes decades to mature, a prolonged developmental period marked by the constant formation of new connections between brain networks.However, observing these physical changes in a lab has proven difficult. While artificially grown models of the organ [grown from human stem cells, called human brain organoids, have allowed scientists to study these processes, they’ve been limited to the earliest stages of development — until now.As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Nature, an international team of scientists have now grown human brain organoids for five full years in a lab. They found that the the…

There are a litany of reasons to distrust Google’s AI Overviews, which now appear at the top of its search results above links to actual websites.The algorithmically generated answers, which pull from various sources online, have quickly become one of the biggest sources of misinformation on the entire internet. The search giant’s AI models are frequently caught hallucinating easily disproven facts, handing out dangerous “health” advice — and gutting the media industry by discouraging users from visiting publications’ sites.Add to the list that it’s now furthering intensely harmful racial stereotypes. As one Reddit user found, searches indicating that the user…