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The state of our inboxes here at Futurism is chaotic. Every day is a cacophony of PR pitches, deranged rants, irrelevant news updates, and too-good-to-be-true business opportunities. (Don’t worry, though: we read every email.)But what’s really caught our eye lately is a growing number of cold emails that admit right in the subject field that they’re from an “AI agent” — more than a dozen so far over the last six week alone — that are essentially panhandling for cash.The agents, all of which were given human names in an apparent attempt to elicit sympathy, identify themselves as bots sent…
Conventional gym etiquette involves carefully wiping down the surfaces of any machines or equipment after using it. Businesses usually provide customers with wet wipes, or simple sprays and towels, to keep faux leather padding and other public surfaces pristine and sanitary.But during professional events, that level of cleanliness isn’t always guaranteed. Organizers of a recent Hyrox competition in China, the spiritual successor of the Crossfit craze, have been accused of allowing participants be exposed to a trail of human waste — left behind, memorably, by the athlete who went on to win the competition.As The Guardian reports, Australian world record…
When 23-year old Lindsey Brooke Isaacs surrendered to police at the advice of her attorney, she was treated like a hardened criminal. Facing eight felony charges, including three counts of vehicular homicide, she spent her first days in custody in solitary confinement, separated from the rest of the jail population.Having been denied bond, Isaacs would spend nearly two weeks in jail, swallowing the prospect of spending the rest of her life behind similar bars. “I was devastated, I was scared,” Isaacs told Fox News. “I thought my life was over.”As grim as it looked, the Florida woman did have one…
Climate change? What climate change?Choosing to bury their heads in the sand on behalf of the citizens of this country and perhaps the planet at large, the Trump administration has announced that the Environmental Protection Agency will eliminate limits on greenhouse gas pollution produced by coal and natural gas power plants, the Associated Press reports.Needless to say, it would be a staggering setback in the federal government’s ability to tackle climate change, and the effects could be long-lasting in both an environmental and legal sense. The administration is also proposing a separate rule that could prevent future administrations from imposing…
There was no livestream and the media wasn’t invited. We didn’t even see a euphoric Elon Musk embarrassing himself on stage. Tesla’s rollout of its two-seater Cybercab robotaxis on the streets of Austin, Texas, this month left investors scratching their heads. With little fanfare, the company stated on Musk’s social media platform X that “Cybercab rides” would “open to public” on September 4.The “Cybercab event was largely a bust,” tweeted Future Fund Advisors co-founder Gary Black at the time. “The launch offered little detail and key questions remained unanswered.”The lack of enthusiasm has reignited concerns over the company’s ability to catch up…
The public messaging surrounding Meta’s flashy smart glasses hasn’t exactly gone in the company’s favor.The camera-equipped devices have garnered a reputation for allowing shady individuals to record strangers without their consent, garnering them the memorable pejorative of “pervert glasses.”So when Wired revealed in June that Meta had silently added facial recognition code to the smart glasses — stoking fears that the creepy glasses could be used to identify people on the street based on biometric data — that simmering distaste grew into a major PR disaster for the company.Meta has ever since vehemently denied that it was planning on ever…
Don’t ask an AI chatbot how many letter e’s there are in the word “seventeen.” Or do, actually, if you want to see how dodgy the tech remains.In a clip that’s gone viral in AI circles, the content creator who goes by “Husk” asks ChatGPT’s Voice mode to answer this simple counting question. Not only does the confident-sounding AI get it wrong — insisting there’re only three e’s instead of four — it doubles down so vehemently that it effectively tries to gaslight the user.“Let’s go through it. S-e-v-e-n-t-e-e-n,” ChatGPT spells out, after assuring that its underlying model, GPT-6, is…
In the age of AI agents, it’s no longer enough to ask how much electricity a single chatbot prompt uses. Today’s AI models are even more complicated systems, often designed to complete complex tasks autonomously, and are made up not only of large language models, but a host of other tools and application layers which demand much more power than the humble standalone chatbot.That makes calculating their total electricity usage a much bigger can of worms. Yet with virtual radio silence from the top private AI labs on internal energy use, it’s nearly impossible to say definitively what kind of…
After over two decades of operation, Amazon Prime has become the backbone of American commerce, more akin to a public utility than a private company. Its logistics network has blown past the US Postal Service in parcel volume, delivering crucial goods to small business owners, trade workers, and teachers at record speed.And like any public utility, Amazon Prime comes with a public price tag — a massive state subsidy paid by taxpayers around the country.Blistering new reporting by Fortune revealed that the number of Amazon workers receiving government assistance via Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid has nearly tripled…
In a whiplash-inducing turn away from the mythical quest to build human-level artificial intelligence, Western tech billionaires like Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk are now joining hands to call for a massive slowdown of the tech’s development.The commentariat is divided on what exactly this means — for some, it’s proof-positive of a genuine threat that AI could spin out of control and exterminate everybody. To others it’s a smokescreen, a thin cover provided by AI CEOs who are desperate for a government bailout to avoid popping the AI investment bubble.If you ask lawmakers in Beijing, the whole thing…