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In a joint statement earlier this week, United Nations chief António Guterres and Red Cross president Mirjana Spoljaric Egger sent out an urgent message.“We are now dangerously close to crossing a moral red line: the autonomous targeting of humans by machines,” they said.But while international humanitarian law strictly forbids targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure, Russia is reportedly already using AI-controlled drones to kill innocent people in Ukraine.Ukrainian military commanders and forensics experts told the New York Times that fully autonomous Russian drones, piloted by an experimental AI system, are targeting civilians back on the ground in Zaporizhzhia, a city in…

When Dolly Parton died this week, everyone mourned. She was the queen of country music and a magnetic actress, enrapturing the public with her bodacious but kind personality. She was a feminist icon and also a gay icon. She was a devout Christian and a loyal wife. There was something about her for everyone to love.In the wake of her death, a data enthusiast on Reddit put together a chart showing Parton’s incredible favorability among both Republicans and Democrats, using data collected by the UMass Lowell Center for Public Opinion. The results were extraordinary, showing that she was one of…

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has a lot to live up to. The orbital observatory, a long-awaited successor to the agency’s revolutionary Hubble Space Telescope, is set to launch on Sunday from the Kennedy Space Center on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.Scientists have high hopes that the $4.3 billion observatory will deeply further their understanding of the expansion of the universe and identify exoplanets orbiting distant stars.But the Nancy Grace Roman didn’t start its life as a way to study the cosmos. The National Reconnaissance Office, a government spy agency, offered NASA one of its surveillance satellites it wasn’t…

In May, Meta laid off roughly ten percent of its global workforce, affecting almost 8,000 people. The vast culling came amidst repeated promises of an AI-led technological revolution that would make human labor a thing of the past. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in particular, was clearly infatuated by the idea.As Reuters reports, Meta execs developed a radical plan under his leadership, codenamed Project Organization Transformation, or Project OT for short, to have AI agents assume the roles of thousands of human staffers.According to the news agency’s extensive reporting, execs originally wanted to cut teams by as much as 60 percent,…

Basement, arguably New York City’s best-known contemporary nightclub, has always had a tight, Berghain-esque door policy. That’s part of its allure. You stand before the bouncer and await to receive their vibe check, and you either get let into its dark, crimson-lit halls, or get turned away, feeling the stigma of being uncool. That’s just the way it is.But it’s not being mysterious about its newest criteria for entry. On social media Thursday, Basement announced an unequivocal “smart glasses policy”: anyone bespectacled with the quirky pieces of spyware immediately gets kicked to the curb.“Our no photo/no video policy exists to…

Much like Google’s infamous Google Glass smart glasses, Meta’s camera-equipped AI Glasses have turned into a widely derided gadget associated with horrendous public behavior and unwanted surveillance.The invasive spectacles, which are designed to effectively be indistinguishable from an ordinary pair of Ray Ban sunglasses, have been misused by creeps, pickup artists, “manfluencers,” juvenile pranksters, and even high school bullies.All that awful behavior has garnered them the pejorative “pervert glasses,” with owners increasingly opting to leave them at home because they’re unwilling to be seen wearing them in public.Now, a patent Meta filed in February and was granted last week suggests…

Leopold Aschenbrenner, the founder of the ill-fated hedge fund Situational Awareness, held a belief in AI so outrageous that it’s literally galaxy-brained.According to a new scoop from The Wall Street Journal, the 24-year-old former OpenAI employee wanted to buy entire cosmic realms after he got rich off of AI — as in, yes, galaxies of stars and planets like our Milky Way, or the neighboring Andromeda.This is something that he’s reportedly been telling people, completely unprompted, at San Francisco dinner parties for years. The way Aschenbrener explained it, advances in AI would soon enable humanity to unlock unlimited resources and…

Meta has officially ended a landmark legal standoff over social media addiction among children, agreeing to pay some $18 billion over the next ten years and make sweeping changes to how it approaches child safety.The lawsuit, organized by the attorneys general of 29 US states, alleged that Meta executives like Mark Zuckerberg created a system that abused data collected from minors, while feigning ignorance about the harms their platforms caused.Though $18 billion is peanuts compared to Meta’s expected $130 billion annual capex, it still represents a significant windfall to be divided amongst the states that brought the suit. Had Meta…

Be assured, citizen, that the mass surveillance state is being put to good use.Earlier this month, the Albany Police Department in Georgia made a post on Facebook asking the public to help identify a man guilty of a despicable crime: picking up $30 off the floor that he found in a Walmart.  Surveillance cameras had caught the villain in the act, and the police department attached a grainy photo of him — an older gentleman — hoping to track him down.“This individual picked up the money and did not turn it in to the employees,” the department wrote in the August…

When police officers in Oklahoma admitted to using electro-shock gloves to subdue two students over the 2025-2026 school year, the community was rightfully outraged. The incident came off the back of new reporting by the Guardian and 404 Media, which revealed that US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement had placed a massive purchase order to procure its own arsenal of shock gloves, propelling the brutal policing gadgets into the national spotlight.Despite their swift rise to infamy of late, the “Generated Low Output Voltage Emitters,” or GLOVEs, are anything but new. In a recent interview with the right-wing publication the Daily Wire,…