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After heaps of criticism, SpaceX said it’ll remove the dozens of fumes-belching gas turbines it’s using to power its gargantuan data centers near Memphis, Tennessee — which it’s been using without a permit — a year from now.In an update on its website spotted by TechCrunch, the Elon Musk-owned company laid out its plan to hook up the sprawling AI facilities, some of the largest in the world, to a 1.2 gigawatt nantural gas power plant. Credit where credit’s due: it’s an improvement over the dismal status quo. But it’ll take a while, and in the meantime the company plans to…
It takes a lot to get your typical white-bread American riled up enough that they’re willing to go to jail. Getting arrested is a massive pain, bringing court dates, fines, and a record that can shadow your job and housing prospects for the rest of your life.For most folks, just the threat of jail time is enough to keep them on their best behavior. Yet in 2026, data centers have become one of the rare issues pushing more and more of Americans to risk it anyway.So far in the US, Futurism has counted at least 37 arrests stemming from protests…
Since the launch of Flock Safety in 2017, the ACLU estimates the company installed some 100,000 automatic license plate readers throughout the United States. The dragnet comes with plenty of downsides to privacy and civil liberties: it’s ripe for abuse by crooked cops, powered by sweatshop labor, and nearly impossible to escape once it designates you a target.But police officials insist it’s worth the trade off — because at it least it helps them catch the bad guys, right? Unfortunately, the reality isn’t quite that peachy.Atlanta, Georgia has experienced far and away the largest influx of ALRPs in the country,…
Last week, OpenAI claimed that a group of its AI models had broken containment, successfully hacking into the systems of open source AI platform Hugging Face to cheat on a benchmark test.In the wake of the announcement, two very distinct narratives have emerged surrounding OpenAI’s claims. Some say it was essentially a publicity stunt, with the company setting parameters for the test that pushed the models toward outrageous behavior. But others, including certain prominent researchers, warn that the hack should serve as a warning shot for an even more severe AI-enabled cybersecurity disaster that’ll inevitably take place as models become…
As unpopular as SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has become in the popular eye, some say the vitriol doesn’t go nearly far enough.In an episode of his podcast Ones and Tooze, Columbia University economic historian Adam Tooze picked apart the increasingly expensive AI arms race and its consequences for humanity. Among Tooze’s observations: the AI boom is completely upending the long-standing social contract under capitalism, a shift embodied most dramatically by Musk.During the podcast, co-host Cameron Abadi asked what a “best case scenario” for AI might look like — where a human-level superintelligence emerges that can automate the world’s…
For a time, it appeared as if AI would find broad acceptance among the American masses. The peanut gallery on social media happily embraced early image generation models as researchers appeared to make significant breakthroughs with the aid of their newfound tools. On paper, surveys found public attitudes toward the tech continued to improve into 2025 — before sharply reversing.In 2026, America’s honeymoon phase with AI seems to be quickly wearing off. According to a joint poll conducted by Bentley University and Gallup, the percentage of US adults who think AI does “more harm than good” is rising, from 31…
When you’re a scientist relying on government funding to conduct your research, and that government suddenly yoinks all your money in the name of “efficiency,” you have to get creative to keep the lights on.Such has been the experience of Daniel Blumstein, a biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, renowned for his work on studying the ground-dwelling rodents known as marmots. After the Trump administration cancelled billions of dollars in federal research grants last year, he and his colleagues decided to start creating content dedicated to the charming mammals — on OnlyFans.As SFGate reports, their account, called “OnlyMarms,”…
The US job market is in a weird place right now. Life is clearly rough for the working class, stuck navigating Kafkaeqsue hiring infrastructure while billionaires devour an ever-larger slice of the world’s wealth. But frustratingly, the data being used to steer the economy tells a rosier story than the one workers actually live. The latest unemployment numbers — a flawed metric, admittedly — showed a slight improvement from May to June, at least on paper. And even as the economy appears to cool its jets, Americans keep spending like there’s no tomorrow, even in the face of aggressive inflation.With…
Suddenly, things ain’t looking great for the AI industry. Or at least for the people pouring loads of money into it.Situational Awareness, a much-hyped AI hedge-fund whose 24-year-old founder Leopold Aschenbrenner preached endless AI gains, basically imploded over this month amid a mass tech sell-off. The Wall Street Journal reported that it’s now down 67 percent in July, forcing Aschenbrenner to desperately seek clients to buy its shares on the cheap to cover its losses.“We let you down this month,” the fund wrote in a letter to clients, per the WSJ.
If you’re among the 2.6 million active users of the popular telehealth apps Hims and Hers to obtain medication for erectile dysfunction, hair loss, and a cavalcade of other intimate issues, there’s probably a very short list of people you want to know about it — and Mark Zuckerberg probably isn’t one of them.On Wednesday, the US Federal Trade Commission filed a major lawsuit against Hims and Hers, over allegations the firm was sharing user’s health information with third party companies, Gizmodo reported. Chief among those third-parties apps was Zuckerberg’s Meta, as well as Snap, two social media companies with…