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Will AI supercharge the economy? Will the data centers powering it bring prosperity and provide paying jobs to the communities they’re built in?Probably not. New research shows that rapid rise of AI has instead coincided with “unusually high levels” of unemployment among college graduates in Texas, the Financial Times reports. Texas, crucially, is the state with the most data center under construction.Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas found that job postings in the state had dramatically fallen for AI-exposed fields since the release of ChatGPT, disproportionately affecting college graduates. By the first quarter of 2025, postings plummeted by…

Uber drivers and their passengers across Nigeria and Uganda were shocked on Wednesday when the platform abruptly ceased operations in the middle of the day — and, in some cases, even mid-trip.According to reporting by the Register, the “Uber rapture,” as it’s come to be known, came with little warning — an email notice sent on the very same day.“We are writing to share some difficult news,” Uber’s email to Nigerian users went, per a screenshot obtained by the outlet TechCabal. “After a thorough review of our business, we have made the tough decision to wind down our operations in…

While most of the vandals ripping down automatic license plate readers prefer to go incognito, an Albuquerque character named Jevon Martinez isn’t afraid to show his face.Weeks after Bernalillo county officials cancelled their contract with the controversial surveillance company Flock earlier this year, Martinez noticed the automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) were still up. In a series of videos posted on social media and flagged by KOB4, Martinez filmed himself tearing the camera towers down in order to return them to their rightful owners.“Since [Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Department] is busy — I know BCSO is busy, everyone who works for…

Around the world, the demand for cleaner alternatives to petroleum-based jet fuel is rising. By 2030, the European Union will require a minimum sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) blend of 6 percent, which will rise to 70 percent by 2050. Countries like the United Kingdom, Singapore, Japan, and Brazil are instituting similar policies, putting pressure on players in the global energy trade to ease reliance on crude oil.SAF can come from all kinds of recycled waste byproducts like plant material, animal fat, and used cooking oil — the latter of which has already become a major source for existing SAF supplies.…

With so many climate projections and mitigation strategies eyeing far-away years like 2050, it can be tempting to assume there’s still time to reverse the worst impacts of an ever-warming planet. Unfortunately, that’s no longer in the cards — at least according to the United Nations Environment Programme, which just released a dismal report calling for the “world to face the inevitability of exceeding global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius” above pre-industrial levels.That’s significant, because the 1.5 degree threshold has long been associated with a range of grim climate tipping points at which the planet will experience irreversible consequences such…

As if a million white collar workers suddenly cried out in terror at once, a great disturbance in the AI force forced down every major AI chatbot service — a brief moment of reprieve from our AI empire overlords.OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and X’s Grok mysteriously went down Thursday morning, and we still don’t know what’s behind it.“All the AI is down,” as one X user put it buntly.OpenAI’s status page noted “elevated errors across ChatGPT and Codex.”

New York City just instituted a sweeping ban on schools using AI in the classroom through the start of high school, along with other restrictions on the technology.Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the one-year moratorium on Wednesday, calling it the “most comprehensive of its kind anywhere in the country.”“The tech industry wants us to believe that AI in early education is not only inevitable, but that it is necessary,” Mamdani said during a press conference. “We do not see it that way. I have yet to see a study showing that AI is beneficial for students in elementary and middle school,…

The animation industry is facing an existential threat in the form of generative AI.Entertainment execs remain adamant that the tech is the answer, allowing fewer workers to accomplish more in less time — a thinly-veiled attempt, critics charge, to pinch pennies and churn out lower quality content.Marketing teams are also frequently caving to the irresistible draw of text-to-video generators, a cutting of corners in ways that are both uninspired and easy to spot. And as the backlash to generative AI continues to grow, especially in creative fields, those attempts are bringing in far more negative than positive attention.Case in point,…

The digital scans of more than 153 million drivers licenses of individuals from the United States and Canada are being sold on the dark web through an easily accessible service called Nexus. As noted cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs noted on his blog this week, the sale has now caught the attention of the FBI, which has launched an official inquiry.On the same day Krebs published his post, the service mysteriously vanished from the dark web, which could make tracking down the people behind the hack more difficult.Nonetheless, the scale of the leak is staggering, and includes not just drivers licenses,…

At this point, the AI economy is like a drunk guy who managed to mount a tiger. Though nothing about the current situation is ideal, there’s no clear way to hop off without ensuring certain doom at the hands of a large, angry cat.So it goes with AI: though the ridiculous cost of data centers demands a seemingly exponential amount of capital, the rest of the economy would be in freefall without it — so better to stay atop the tiger, on the unlikely chance that this chaotic approach somehow domesticates our large furry friend.As far as productivity goes, the…