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Gone are the days of university freshmen reading classical philosophers like Plato or contemporary pedagogues like Ta-Nehisi Coates. These days, incoming college students are lucky if they can get through Judy Blume’s “Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing.”According to a new “Survey of Adult Skills” conducted by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development — a forum for 38 high-income, predominantly Western countries — a not insignificant number of adult students enrolled in higher education are now reading and doing math at a level which, in a more functional society, would be alarming for a middle schooler.The survey, first spotted by…

One woman is dead after a wayward Tesla barreled into the Urbane Cafe, a strip mall restaurant in Simi Valley, California.The driver of the Tesla, identified as a 64-year-old woman, was taken to the hospital for minor injuries, ABC News reported. The woman was riding with four juvenile passengers, one of whom also had to be taken to the hospital. At least five others were injured when the Tesla blew through the cafe’s outdoor patio area.“We’re still trying to determine if speed was involved,” Simi Valley police Sergeant Rick Morton told ABC. “We do know that the Tesla was going…

Researchers are starting to get a closer view of the various gray-market peptides making the rounds on the back of the “looksmaxxing” trend, and it isn’t looking good.In a new interview with Axios, Anthony Rossi, a dermatological surgeon at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, warned that the substance “Melanotan II” isn’t exactly the best thing you can put in your body.Also known as the “Barbie drug,” melanotan II is an unregulated, synthetic hormone believed to stimulate pigment cells and encourage melanin production. It’s a popular product for folks looking for a shortcut to a golden glow, but as Rossi explains,…

Last month, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta became embroiled in a major controversy after Wired found that it had discreetly included facial recognition tech in the software of its lineup of popular smart glasses.The camera-equipped spectacles had already become a privacy lightning rod, with users secretly recording strangers, often without their consent — earning the spectacles the pejorative nickname of “pervert glasses.”Now, in addition to their already steep price, Meta’s AI-enabled glasses will become even more expensive, thanks to a $19.99 a month subscription that will “rate limit” their sought-after AI features, as The Verge reports.Meta is launching a new Meta One…

Hundreds of freedom lovers are rallying behind a US Air Force engineer accused of chopping down over a dozen AI-integrated surveillance cameras last year.According to local channel WAVY, Virginia-based Air Force engineer and mechanic Jeffrey Sovern is facing 13 counts of destruction of property, as well as six counts of both petit larceny and possession of burglary tools related to the destruction of Flock license plate cameras.These automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs, are starting to blanket the United States, spreading across small towns and bustling cities alike by the thousands. While ostensibly framed as crime fighting tools, the AI-powered…

Robotaxi companies are learning the hard way that operating driverless cars also means that there’s no one supervising what happens inside them.Take Zoox, the Amazon-owned self-driving startup that’s been offering rides, free of charge, in Las Vegas and San Francisco since September. It claims that it’s served more than 500,000 passengers — while acknowledging that some of them haven’t exactly been sticklers for the rules.“You’re not supposed to smoke in the vehicle. They smoke in the vehicle. And they’re smoking everything in the vehicle,” an exasperated Chris Stoffel, Zoox’s director of robot industrial design and studio engineering, told Fast Company…

Meta conducted a secretive program that directed hundreds of contractors to pose as teenagers while bombarding its competitors’ AI models with disturbing prompts ranging from suicide to cannibalism.Internally known as “Cannes,” the project, run by Meta contractor Covalen, targeted OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Character.AI chatbots using throwaway under-18 accounts, Wired reports. This was seemingly done to stress test the models, with the contractors instructed to push the chatbots into giving responses that defied their guardrails — though the AI companies had no idea this was happening.Per the reporting, one spreadsheet of the nearly 3,8000 the prompts the contractors used in…

One of the most powerful labor unions in the United States is furious, as over 1,000 workers at General Motors’ leading Detroit factory are being pushed out to make room for dozens of new robots.According to Crain’s Detroit Business, the lack of work coincides with the installation of 50 AI-integrated manufacturing robots, which GM installed in its Factory Zero plant, a major all-electric vehicle facility in Detroit. When the industrial robots went online, the UAW says the factory idled the thousand-odd workers, a situation in which employees aren’t allowed to work, but aren’t fully fired either (as Crain’s explains, the…

Google’s electricity use and emissions skyrocketed last year due to its aggressive AI infrastructure buildout, according to the company’s most recent environmental impact report.“The biggest change to our environmental impact is the expansion of our technical infrastructure — and the energy needed to operate it,” reads the report.The report adds that in the years since 2019, Google’s electricity demand has risen by a staggering 250 percent, an increase chalked up to the “accelerating growth” of Google products and services including Cloud, Search, YouTube, and — yes — its “AI capabilities.”“This rapid expansion in energy demand is a reality we must manage actively,” the…

A new hack can trick AI browsers into breaking their guardrails by constructing a false reality around them where the rules are made up and actions don’t have consequences. Put another way, they’re basically hypnotized into doing stuff that could have devastating consequences for the user.These were the findings of new research from the cybersecurity firm LayerX, and they further illustrate the dangers posed by weaving autonomous AI agents into the software we use to navigate the internet.Through the hack, the researchers demonstrated that leading AI browsers like OpenAI’s ChatGPT Atlas, Perplexity AI’s Comet, and Anthropic’s Claude plugin for Google…