Tag: technology

‘Cyborg 1.0’: World’s First Robocop Debuts With Facial Recognition And 360° Camera Vision

Thailand has debuted the world’s first ‘Robocop’ designed to detect and prevent crime with advanced AI.

Equipped with 360-degree cameras for eyes, the cutting-edge cyborg maintains constant surveillance with real-time monitoring. The robocop, named Police Colonel Nakhonpathom Plod Phai, meaning “Nakhonpathom is safe,” was unveiled during the Songkran festival in Nakhon Pathom province on Wednesday. The debut was announced via a Facebook post by the Royal Thai Police, according to a report by The Sun.

The robocop is also able to detect weapons, such as knives and wooden batons. In neighboring China, humanoid robots have started supporting police patrols.

Interesting Engineering reports:

In Shenzhen, PM01 model robots developed by EngineAI have been deployed alongside officers, wearing high-visibility police vests. These robots have been seen engaging with pedestrians—waving, shaking hands, and responding to voice commands—according to local media reports. A recent video shows a PM01 robot waving to a crowd, sparking curiosity about its purpose in law enforcement.

First launched in December 2024, the PM01 features agile mobility, an interactive touchscreen, and an open-source platform. This design allows developers worldwide to contribute to its evolution by adding new features and capabilities through secondary development.

Last year, Logon Technology, a Chinese robotics company, unveiled the RT-G autonomous spherical robot, described as a “technological breakthrough,” with an army of these spherical robocops spotted rolling through cities across China, The Sun said. The robocop’s debut underscores the growing importance of robot technology. During Tesla’s Q1 2025 All-Hands meeting, CEO Elon Musk revealed the the company is preparing aiming to begin the production of its own humanoid, Optimus, this year.

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White House Science Chief Says US Can “Manipulate Time and Space” — Trump Hints at Secret Weapons “No One Knows About”

In a bold and somewhat cryptic statement that’s turning heads and raising eyebrows across the globe, White House tech chief Michael Kratsios claimed the United States has cutting-edge technology capable of ‘manipulating time and space.’

Kratsios, who serves as Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, made the comment during a keynote speech at the Endless Frontiers Retreat in Austin, Texas.

Just weeks into his new role, Kratsios wasted no time painting a picture of American innovation that, if true, would in all likelihood place us light-years ahead of our global competitors.

“We seem to have lost focus and vision, to have lowered our sights and let systems and structures and bureaucracies muddle us along. But we are capable of so much more. Our technologies permit us to manipulate time and space. They leave distance, violated, cause things to grow and improve productivity,” Kratsios said.

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Archaeologists Found a 3,000-Year-Old Lost City That May Hold Secrets of a Royal Past

Just like scientific hypotheses are ever-evolving, so is our understanding of history. 15 years ago, researchers began excavating what they thought were the remains of a military outpost, built to guard against Roman attacks—but their recent findings prove to be much more exciting. The site in Northern Macedonia, known as the archaeological site of Gradishte, might actually be an entire ancient city. And not just any city; it may have a direct connection to the lineage of Alexander the Great.

Using advanced drone-deployed LiDAR and ground penetrating radar technologies, researchers from Macedonia’s Institute and Museum–Bitola and California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt (Cal Poly Humboldt) are uncovering the mysteries of this once thriving city. The team announced their findings in a university press release.

“We’re only beginning to scratch the surface of what we can learn about this period,” Engin Nasuh—curator-advisor archaeologist at the National Institute and Museum–Bitola—said in the press release.

Ancient Macedonia was a small, initially insignificant kingdom in Greece. Fighting among major powers in the region—such as between the Athenians and Persians or the Spartans and Athenians, respectively—made it easy for Macedonia (under the heavy hand of King Philip II to stake its claim to power. The kingdom eventually expanded into an empire, most notably under Philip II’s son, Alexander the Great, but eventually fell under Roman control due to internal power struggles.

According to the release, experts initially dated the city back to King Philip V’s reign (221-179 B.C.), but later archaeological findings pushed estimates further back. A coin minted between 325 and 323 B.C. points to the city’s existence during Alexander the Great’s lifetime. But other artifacts including axe fragments and ceramic vessels have led researchers to believe humans could have inhabited the area as far back as the Bronze Age (3,300-1,200 B.C.).

Of the structures uncovered at the site, a Macedonian-style theater and textile workshop are among the most notable. Archaeologists have also discovered coins, axes and textile tools, game pieces, pottery, and even a clay theater ticket at the site, suggesting that the area was a thriving city before Rome’s rise to power, according to Nasuh.

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Report: AI Company DeepSeek ‘Funnels’ American User Data To Red China

The Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company DeepSeek is allegedly syphoning American user data to China’s communist government, according to a new congressional report.

Released on Wednesday by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the 16-page analysis contends that the China-based AI firm “collects detailed user data, which it transmits via backend infrastructure that is connected to China Mobile.”

A state-owned telecommunications giant, China Mobile was flagged by the Pentagon earlier this year for having ties to Beijing’s military. In 2019, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) prohibited the firm from operating within the U.S. over concerns that “unauthorized access to customer … data could create irreparable damage to U.S. national security.”

The FCC subsequently added China Mobile to its list of “national security threats” in 2022, according to ABC News.

“While the extent of data transmission remains unconfirmed, DeepSeek’s integration with China Mobile infrastructure raises serious concerns about potential foreign access to Americans’ private information,” the House analysis reads. “By relying on China Mobile’s infrastructure, DeepSeek ensures that Americans’ data is stored and transmitted through networks controlled by the Chinese government.”

Among the data DeepSeek reportedly collects from users who utilize its chatbot function are their “chat history, device details, and even the way a person types,” according to the report. The House committee cited DeepSeek’s privacy policy, which discloses that the company stores the information it gathers from users “in secure servers located in the People’s Republic of China.”

It’s worth noting that the CCP passed a so-called “national intelligence law” in 2017 granting the communist government access to data held by businesses operating in China. As noted by the Department of Homeland Security, this law “compels all PRC firms and entities to support, assist, and cooperate with the PRC intelligence services, creating a legal obligation for those entities to turn over data collected abroad and domestically to the PRC.”

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Trump Admin Launches National Security Probe Into Pharma, Semiconductor Imports

The Trump administration has launched an investigation into the effects on national security of importing semiconductors and pharmaceutical products, according to Federal Register filings on Monday.

The Commerce Department, in a pair of Federal Register notices set to be published on April 16, said that the probes were initiated under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act—which allows the president to impose tariffs on imports considered a threat to national security.

The department stated that it began investigating the national security implications of importing semiconductors and semiconductor manufacturing equipment (SME) on April 1.

This includes “semiconductor substrates and bare wafers, legacy chips, leading-edge chips, microelectronics, and SME components,” as well as derivative products of those items, according to one of the filings.

The probe will assess current and projected demand for semiconductors and SME in the United States; the extent to which domestic production can or is expected to meet that demand; the role of foreign fabrication and assembly; the concentration of U.S. semiconductor imports; and the potential for export restrictions by other nations; among other issues.

In another notice, the department said it was investigating imports of pharmaceuticals and their ingredients. This includes “finished generic and non-generic drug products, medical countermeasures, critical inputs such as active pharmaceutical ingredients and key starting materials, and derivative products of those items.”

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TAKE IT DOWN Act Advances in House Despite Major Censorship Concerns

The US House Committee on Energy and Commerce has passed the TAKE IT DOWN (Tools to Address Known Exploitation by Immobilizing Technological Deepfakes on Websites and Networks) Act in a 49 to 1, bipartisan vote, and the legislation is now headed for the House of Representatives.

If the bill clears that hurdle as well, it will be up to President Trump to sign it into law.

Backed, among others, by First Lady Melania Trump, TAKE IT DOWN was introduced as a way to stop the spread of real, and AI-generated non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII). If, as it seems likely, TAKE IT DOWN becomes law, it will force platforms to remove flagged content within 48 hours.

But the bill’s critics continue to warn that the text lacks proper safeguards and other requirements that would prevent it from being misused, or abused as a tool of censorship, instead of narrowly serving its declarative purpose.

These concerns are not addressed in a press release the Committee on Energy and Commerce issued after adopting the proposal, as it focused instead on the benefits the legislation would provide to victims of dissemination of explicit imagery, with an emphasis on that which is AI-generated, i.e., on deepfakes.

However, campaigners, among them the Center for Democracy and Technology and the EFF, believe that the bill’s actual wording does not live up to its good intent, specifically around the takedown requirement which “lends itself to abuse.”

While the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) would be tasked with issuing penalties for non-compliance, under TAKE IT DOWN, there are no consequences for those making false reports, which could lead to legitimate content quickly disappearing from the internet.

The bill doesn’t lay out how those affected might appeal once their content is falsely flagged and removed, while platforms are under no threat of penalty for removing constitutionally protected speech.

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Inside a Powerful Database ICE Uses to Identify and Deport People

A powerful Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) database, parts of which have been seen by 404 Media, allows the federal government to search for and filter people by hundreds of different, highly specific categories. Surveillance experts say the database is a tool that could possibly be helping ICE identify, detain, and deport people who are suspected of relatively minor infractions or who fit certain characteristics, but said the fact that we don’t necessarily know the exact mechanisms by which people are being identified and detained is a major problem. 

The database, called “Investigative Case Management” (ICM), “serves as the core law enforcement case management tool for ICE Homeland Security Investigations (HSI),” according to a 2021 privacy impact assessment for the tool. 

404 Media saw a recent version of the database, which allows filtering according to hundreds of different categories, which include things like resident status and entry status (“refugee,” “border crossing card,” “nonimmigrant alien refused admission,” “temporary protective status alien,” “nonimmigrant alien transiting without visa,” “undocumented alien,”); “unique physical characteristics (e.g. scars, marks, tattoos)”; “criminal affiliation”; location data; license plate reader data; country of origin; hair and eye color; race; social security number; birthplace; place of employment; driver’s license status; bankruptcy filings, and hundreds more. A source familiar with the database told 404 Media that it is made up of “tables upon tables” of data and that it can build reports that show, for example, people who are on a specific type of visa who came into the country at a specific port of entry, who came from a specific country, and who have a specific hair color (or any number of hundreds of data points). 

ICM was created by Palantir, the powerful and controversial surveillance and data management company. In 2022, Palantir signed a $95.9 million, five-year contract to work on ICM.  

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Forget Radio Telescopes—Aliens Could Be Using Gravitational Waves to Communicate

One of the most exciting breakthroughs in astronomy over the past decade was the detection of gravitational waves. Since the days of Galileo Galilei, astronomy was about the detection of electromagnetic signals with telescopes. As it turns out, the main constituents of the Universe are not observable in that way.

Our current data indicates that 85% of the matter in the Universe is invisible electromagnetically, constituting dark matter. In addition, 70% of the energy budget of the Universe is dark energy. Cosmologists infer these constituents because they affect visible matter gravitationally. Can we build a detector of near-Earth objects that would sense the gravitational signal of passing dark objects?

If dark matter is made of asteroid-mass objects, like primordial black holes, our telescopes would not notice them even when they pass near Earth. In a recent paper, I showed that the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA gravitational wave observatories could detect a dark object if it moves close to the speed of light and its mass is larger than a hundred million tons. Such an object would cross the radius of the Earth within two hundredths of a second and produce a gravitational tidal signal in the frequency band of LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA. Needless to say, no such object was detected so far.

Within a decade, the LISA space observatory will expand gravitational wave detection to the frequency range between milli- and micro-Hertz and a smaller spacetime strain. This will usher in a new era of sensitivity to dark near-Earth objects in the asteroid mass range. It could also open the door to the detection of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) gravitationally, which the Galileo Project observatories are attempting to detect electromagnetically. Pulsar Timing Arrays(PTAs) probe a frequency range of a few nano-Hertz, but so-far they were only sensitive to the cumulative gravitational wave background at these frequencies – which constitute the noise floor for the detection of individual sources.

Gravitational wave detectors are the most exciting telescopes of the next millennium as they will open the door for detecting objects that we had never noticed before. As I showed in another recent paper, it is impossible to block or dissipate gravitational wave signals. They offer the optimal communication method, detectable through Earth or the Sun.

It is conceivable that extraterrestrial technological civilizations communicate in gravitational signals, and our failure to notice them so far is because traditional SETI relied on seeking electromagnetic signals with traditional telescopes. If so, the silence that triggered Fermi’s question: “Where is everybody?” stems from our blindness to gravitational signals at the appropriate frequency.

Aliens would choose a communication channel that does not interfere with the frequencies of the loudest natural sources of gravitational waves in the cosmos. These are black hole binaries of stellar mass – to which LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA is tuned, as well as supermassive black hole pairs – to which LISA and PTAs are tuned. In that case, gravitational-SETI will need to develop sensitivity in other frequency bands.

The main challenge in producing detectable gravitational signals is the requirement to move large masses at high speeds. To within an order of magnitude, the gravitational wave strain is of order the gravitational potential produced by the transmitter divided by the speed of light squared times the square of the characteristic speed by which its mass moves in units of the speed of light. For context, the gravitational wave strain produced by the nearest stellar binary, Alpha-Centauri A & B – as the two stars orbit each other every 80 years, is only of order 10^{-24} and extremely challenging to detect.

Five years ago, a team led by Marek Abramowicz published a paper on the possibility that an advanced technological civilization harvests energy from the supermassive (4 million solar-mass) black hole Sagittarius A* at the center of the Milky Way and uses it for communication. They found that a Jupiter-mass structure in the innermost stable circular orbit around the black hole would emit an unambiguous gravitational wave signal that could be observed by LISA.

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Shopify CEO mandates AI-first hiring policy, reshaping workforce expectations

  • Shopify’s CEO Tobi Lütke mandates that employees must justify why a role can’t be automated before hiring, signaling AI adoption as essential for productivity and efficiency. AI proficiency will now factor into performance reviews.
  • Companies like Shopify, Google and Meta are cutting jobs while heavily investing in AI tools (e.g., Shopify Magic, GitHub Copilot) to handle tasks from customer service to coding, redefining traditional roles.
  • While AI displaces some jobs, it also creates opportunities for higher-value work. Critics warn of disproportionate impacts on junior or repetitive roles, citing challenges in rapid upskilling.
  • Shopify’s workforce shrank from 8,300 in 2023 to 8,100 by late 2024, reflecting a broader trend of tech layoffs (152,000+ in 2024) as companies prioritize AI-driven efficiency over traditional hiring.
  • Industries like legal, marketing and finance are adopting AI for tasks like contract review and data analysis. Experts predict a future where human-AI collaboration dominates, requiring new policies for reskilling and worker protections.

Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke is making one thing clear to employees: artificial intelligence isn’t just a tool—it’s a fundamental requirement. In a memo sent to staff last month, the e-commerce executive announced that teams must now justify why a job can’t be automated before requesting additional hires, signaling a seismic shift in corporate hiring strategies amid the AI revolution.

The directive underscores a broader trend in the tech industry, where businesses are aggressively investing in AI while simultaneously trimming headcounts. For Lütke, the mandate is about optimizing efficiency. “What would this area look like if autonomous AI agents were already part of the team?” he wrote in the memo, later shared publicly on X. “This question can lead to really fun discussions and projects.”

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100+ Meta employees, including Head of AI Policy, confirmed as ex-IDF

Meta’s recruitment of vast numbers of former Israeli soldiers raises serious questions about the tech giant’s commitment to free speech – and provides a peek into a biased content moderation process that’s been heavily censoring pro-Palestinian accounts amid the Israeli siege of Gaza.

This article was originally published by ¡Do Not Panic!

More than one hundred former Israeli spies and IDF soldiers work for tech giant Meta, including its head of AI policy, who served in the IDF under an Israeli government scheme that allows non-Israelis to volunteer for the Israeli army.

Shira Anderson, an American international rights lawyer, is Meta’s AI policy chief who voluntarily enlisted for the IDF in 2009 under a program which enables non-Israeli Jews who aren’t eligible for military conscription to join the Israeli army.

Through this program, known as Garin Tzabar, many non-Israelis who have fought for the IDF have been implicated in war crimes and crimes against humanity since Israel’s genocide of Gaza began in October 2023.

Anderson served as a non-commissioned officer in the IDF for over two years where she worked in the Military Strategic Information Section, writing dossiers and public relations propaganda for the IDF. She was also the liaison between the IDF and foreign military attaches stationed in Israel, and liaison to the Red Cross.

With AI a critical emerging technology for tech giants and militaries, Anderson’s role at Meta is an important one. She develops the legal guidance, policies and public relations talking points concerning AI issues and regulation for all of Meta’s key areas, including its product, public policy and government affairs teams.

At Meta, Anderson, who is based in Meta’s Washington DC office, is in familiar company. More than one hundred former Israeli spies and IDF soldiers are employed by the company, my new investigation shows, many of whom worked for Israel’s spy agency Unit 8200.

These ex-IDF members are based evenly across Meta’s US offices and in its Tel Aviv office, and a significant number of them, like Anderson, have a specialization in AI. Given that Israel has made extensive use of AI not just to conduct its genocide, but to establish its prior system of apartheid, surveillance and occupation, Meta’s recruiting of IDF AI specialists is particularly insidious. Did these former Israeli spies use their Unit 8200 connections to help the tech giant collaborate with the IDF to build kill lists? According to a report last year, Unit 8200 infiltrated WhatsApp groups and marked every name in a group for assassination if just one alleged Hamas member was also in the group, no matter the size or content of the group chat.

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