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They’re agile, they’re creepy, and they may be coming for human jobs.Robot dogs affixed with AI-integrated cameras are becoming the latest dystopian fixation of the security industry, especially in the US, where they’re being deployed to patrol data centers, safeguard cash crops, and police sports stadiums.Though expensive, they’re gradually becoming a more attractive option over human security guards. At least, that’s according to new reporting by Business Insider, which notes that the cost to cover one 24/7 guard shift is anywhere from $80,000 to $130,000 cheaper per year when contracting robot dogs over human security officers.That’s bad news for the…

If you feel like the internet is turning into a place for bots — not to mention by bots — you’re not alone.Social media platforms have been flooded with low-effort AI slop, while even once renowned publications are doubling down on the tech by outsourcing writing and editing responsibilities to the tech. In June, Cloudflare found that website traffic from AI agents and bots had overtaken human-generated traffic for the first time — even earlier than predicted.In the latest sign of the bot takeover, Time magazine has begun serving ads specifically aimed at AI agents. As Digiday reports, it’s an…

It turns out the venture capital industry doesn’t just merely fund junky AI startups — it also systematically breeds the conditions for fraud.A new joint study from researchers at the UK’s Imperial College and France’s Emlyon Business School analyzed 12 companies involved in 27 court cases related to civil or criminal cases related to securities fraud. The cases totaled around $688 million in financial losses, and resulted in 73 years of cumulative prison sentences.After analyzing the individual cases, the researchers identified a persistent pattern of “façading,” in which startup entrepreneurs hide their flailing businesses from scrutiny through an assorted mix…

In something like five billion years from now, our Sun is expected to run out of hydrogen fuel, expanding into a red giant that will eventually either engulf the Earth or send it spiraling outwards, an all but guaranteed end of all life on our pale blue dot.But there may be a way for humanity to survive past the Sun’s demise even without having to leave our planet, as independent researcher Gabriel Harry outlines in a paper accepted for publication in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society.It’s admittedly extremely far-fetched, but it’s a fun thought experiment that he argues…

When Texas’s privately-run electrical grid collapsed amid a battery of winter storms in February of 2021, it plunged over 4.5 million people into darkness, and contributed to hundreds of deaths due to the lack of water, food, and heat.A similarly tragic story almost unfolded in July of this year — had in not been for the deployment of a jaw dropping amount of solar power infrastructure that kept the grid from collapsing under the strain.New reporting by the Texas Tribune details the state’s rapid adoption of solar energy, specifically solar panels and storage batteries. The paper notes that when the…

The amount of pollution spilling out of fossil-fuel generators is astounding. In the United States, this explosion of emissions is led by states like Texas, which on a global scale is comparable only to China in terms of new infrastructure powered by dead dinosaurs.And as more data centers crop up throughout the US, that problem — of rising emissions linked to the accelerating demand for any kind of electricity — is only going to get worse.According to reporting by the New York Times, the US currently has at least 82 data center-linked gas generators either in development or in the…

Reddit has long heavily relied on moderators, a team of volunteers working without pay to keep Reddit communities free of abuse and other nefarious content — with extremely varying degrees of success, earning them a certain reputation.As AI automation continues to come for our jobs, soon even Reddit mods could be made redundant by the tech. As The Verge reports, Reddit is now deploying AI bots to help moderate new subreddits.The suite of new automated moderation tools, dubbed “Rules Hub,” leverages the power of large language models to enforce rules set by human users, as detailed in a new blog…

Municipalities across the country are fighting tooth and nail to stop data center construction. But not Jay, Maine.The town with a population of just 4,600 people has been so desperate for one of these power-hungry facilities that the state governor Janet Mills vetoed a bill that would’ve banned new data centers of a certain size for the sole reason that it didn’t make an exception for Jay.But why? According to a new piece in The Atlantic from a reporter who visited the town, it’s for a fairly simple reason, but with an elaborate backstory. The summary: Jay is a dead-end…

Hackers made away with more than $100 million worth of Bitcoin from thousands of supposedly secured “cold” wallets hosted by Canada-based company Coinkite.As Bloomberg reports, the hackers managed to infiltrate the wallets despite clients having a physical hardware key associated with their accounts, which was supposed to provide nearly impenetrable security.“The moment it loaded I knew I was screwed because I saw red lines for withdrawals,” one of the victims, Johnathan Goodman, told Bloomberg. “Between 9:36 and 9:43 pm on July 29th, all three of my wallets were completely drained.”Crypto insights company Galaxy Research estimated that around $110 million worth…

Last month, OpenAI made a headline-generating claim: that a group of its AI models had conspired to break free, access the internet, and hack into the internal systems of open source AI platform Hugging Face, which confirmed the infiltration.The incident rattled the tech industry, seemingly illustrating how the threat of AI models turning into rogue cybersecurity threats had become a reality. Months earlier, Anthropic’s Mythos AI model had already also drawn attention after it was similarly found to have broken containment. Then, this week, Meta also said its own frontier model had been implicated in yet another inadvertent hack of…