Tag: technology

Armed drones designed to neutralize school shooters in seconds are being tested in several Florida districts

Three districts in Florida will be testing out a series of new drones armed with pepper spray pellets that are specifically designed to thwart school shootings.

Campus Guardian Angel, a Texas-based company that engineered the drone tech system, said that the exact districts will be selected by Florida’s Department of Education.

Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the largest district in the state, has already shown interest in participating and held test runs at a campus in July, CBS News reported.

The drones, kept in secure charging boxes on participating campuses, will be operated by FAA-certified pilots located in Texas.

But each drone can be activated by school officials on-site through a silent alarm or “other mechanisms,” according to Campus Guardian Angel.

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Saudi AI Firm Launches Halal Chatbot

Companies with AI chatbots love to highlight their capability as translators, but they still default to English, both in function and in the information they are trained on. With that in mind, Humain, an AI company in Saudi Arabia, has now launched an Arabic-native chatbot.

The bot, called Humain Chat, runs on the Allam large language model, according to Bloomberg, which the company claims was trained on “one of the largest Arabic datasets ever assembled” and is the “world’s most advanced Arabic-first AI model.” The company says that it is not only fluent in the Arabic language, but also in “Islamic culture, values and heritage.” (If you have religious concerns about using Humain Chat, consult your local Imam.) The chatbot, which will be made available as an app, will first be available only in Saudi Arabia and currently supports bilingual conversations in Arabic and English, supporting dialects including Egyptian and Lebanese. The plan is for the app to roll out across the Middle East and eventually go global, with the goal of serving the nearly 500 million Arabic-speaking people across the world.

Humain took on Allam and the chatbot project after it was started by the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority, a government agency and tech regulator. For that reason, Bloomberg raises the possibility that Humain Chat may comply with censorship requests of the Saudi government and restrict the kind of information made available to users.

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Senator Amy Klobuchar Can’t Take A Joke, Demands Censorship Law

Senator Amy Klobuchar has acknowledged what opponents of her legislation have been warning all along.

In a recent New York Times opinion piece, she confirmed that her proposed NO FAKES Act would be used to censor AI-generated parody.

Her target is a meme video that pokes fun at her reaction to an American Eagle jeans advertisement featuring actress Sydney Sweeney.

Rather than brush off the obvious satire, Klobuchar doubled down on the need to suppress it. “As anyone would, I wanted the video taken down or at least labeled ‘digitally altered content,’” she wrote.

She applauded TikTok for removing the clip, praised Meta for tagging it, and expressed frustration that X would not help her attach a Community Note.

This public complaint confirms that the NO FAKES Act, Senate Bill 1367, is not just about preventing identity theft or stopping fraud. Klobuchar is one of the bill’s lead authors, and she is openly calling for legal tools to remove content that ridicules her.

The bill gives individuals the right to sue over the creation or distribution of “unauthorized digital replicas.”

It also places heavy compliance burdens on platforms, which would face steep fines for failing to remove flagged content quickly or for not implementing policies to suspend repeat offenders.

While the bill claims to allow space for parody, satire, and documentaries, Klobuchar’s statements make it clear that those exemptions offer little practical protection.

The parody video in question shows an AI-generated version of Klobuchar speaking at a fake Senate hearing, ranting about Democrats needing more visibility in advertising. The fictional version of the senator says, “If Republicans are going to have beautiful girls with perfect titties…we want ugly, fat bitches wearing pink wigs and long-ass fake nails being loud and twerking on top of a cop car at a Waffle House ‘cause they didn’t get extra ketchup.”

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Humanity’s Doomsday Clock: Experts Bet on 1-in-6 Odds of Total Wipeout

Experts estimate varying probabilities for human extinction or severe societal collapse within the coming decades.

Toby Ord, in his book “The Precipice,” assesses a one-in-six chance of existential catastrophe this century, encompassing risks from artificial intelligence and other factors.

Nick Bostrom’s work highlights a median expert estimate of 19 percent for human extinction from global catastrophic risks.

Jared Diamond predicts a 50-50 chance of survival beyond 2050, based on patterns of past civilizations.

Historical research shows civilizations often collapse due to recurring factors. Luke Kemp’s analysis of over 400 societies across 5,000 years indicates that inequality and elite overreach frequently lead to self-termination.

Diamond identifies environmental damage, climate shifts, and poor societal responses as key contributors to downfall.

These patterns suggest modern global interconnectedness could amplify impacts, leaving no recovery options.

Nuclear weapons remain a primary threat, with around 10,000 warheads held by nations including the United States, Russia, China, and others.

Recent assessments place nuclear risk alongside climate change and AI in pushing the Doomsday Clock to its closest point to midnight.

Engineered pandemics and biological threats add to the list, potentially spreading rapidly via global travel.

Kemp suggests that climate change now proceeds at a rate ten times faster than historical extinctions, risking agricultural declines and mass migrations. By 2070, up to two billion people may face extreme heat, halving viable land for key crops.

Developing regions could suffer most from these shifts, though subsistence farming might mitigate some food shortages in Africa.

Artificial intelligence poses risks of misalignment or unintended consequences, with experts warning of potential catastrophe.

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CEO Boasts That He Laid Off 80 Percent of His Staff Because They Didn’t Love AI Enough, Threatens to Do It Again

When it comes to AI, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more groveling cheerleader than the humble CEO. As hype around the software grows, business execs have become astonishingly comfortable sharing their hopes that AI will soon make human labor a thing of the past.

Now, even as Wall Street begins to reckon with the empty promises of AI automation, one CEO is bragging about laying off almost all of his workforce in the face of the tech — a move he says he would make again.

Recent reporting by Fortune detailed the mind-boggling strategy deployed by Eric Vaughan, CEO of a$26 million software firm called IgniteTech, which involved culling 80 percent of its staff — not to automate their roles, strikingly, but because they didn’t share his enthusiasm for AI.

Mere months after the first ChatGPT model hit the world in early 2023 — a technology the CEO called “an existential threat” — Vaughan started making an AI push throughout the company. As employees became increasingly hostile to company initiatives like “AI Mondays” — a day dedicated to building the company’s AI system, regardless of a worker’s department —  he was soon replacing hundreds of employees.

“In those early days, we did get resistance, we got flat-out, ‘Yeah, I’m not going to do this’ resistance,” Vaughan told Fortune. “And so we said goodbye to those people.”

The most pushback, the CEO told the publication, wasn’t from staffers in roles like marketing or sales, but from tech workers who understood the limitations of the AI being crammed down their throats. It’s not hard to see why — analysts argue that when workers are reduced to shepherding AI systems around, they feel alienated from the meaning of their jobs.

That sense of alienation becomes even more pervasive when mass rounds of layoffs and replacements add to the stress workers feel in an already turbulent economy.

Worker pushback, which Vaughan likened to “mass resistance, even sabotage,” prevented the IgniteTech’s first AI scheme. After culling those who dared to use what little power they had as workers to alter the direction of the company, Vaughan had his way.

Soon, every division was reporting to IgniteTech’s newly hired “chief AI officer,” Thibault Bridel-Bertomeu, a sort of centralized bureaucracy with AI firmly at the core.

Though profits have reportedly increased since IgniteTech’s executives began their draconian campaign, they do so at the obvious expense of hundreds of experienced workers who now face one of the toughest job markets in recent memory.

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Chrome VPN Extension With 100k Installs Screenshots All Sites Users Visit

FreeVPN.One, a Chrome extension with over 100,000 installs and a verified badge on the Chrome Web Store, is exposed by researchers for taking screenshots of users’ screens and exfiltrating them to remote servers.

A Koi Security investigation of the VPN tool reveals that it has been capturing full-page screenshots from users’ browsers, logging sensitive visual data like personal messages, financial dashboards, and private photos, and uploading it to aitd[.]one, a domain registered by the extension’s developer.

Koi Security’s forensic analysis showed that the surveillance mechanism is triggered automatically, within seconds of loading any web page. Using Chrome’s privileged chrome.tabs.captureVisibleTab() API, screenshots are silently taken in the background and bundled with metadata including page URLs, tab IDs, and unique user identifiers. This data is then transmitted to the attacker-controlled server aitd.one/brange.php, without user interaction or visible indication.

The spying behavior is powered by a two-stage architecture:

  1. A content script injected into every visited site using matches (http:///, https:///).
  2. A background service worker that listens for an internal captureViewport message and initiates the screenshot capture.

The extension also promotes an “AI Threat Detection” feature which, when clicked, captures another screenshot and sends it to aitd.one/analyze.php. However, the real issue lies in the fact that screenshots are being taken long before users ever interact with this feature, making the user interface a decoy.

Koi Security further explains that the latest version of the extension, v3.1.4, introduced AES-256-GCM encryption with RSA key wrapping to obfuscate the exfiltrated data, making it harder to detect or analyze with network monitoring tools.

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The Average Person Is Far More Scared of AI Than Excited by It, Studies Find

AI is dominating the economy and at the top of policy agendas. Ads for it are everywhere. Your favorite artist is probably experimenting with it. And as hundreds of billions of dollars get poured into the tech, it can feel like the whole world is holding its breath for when it somehow becomes superintelligent and magically ushers us into a utopic age. The optimism is breathless and inescapable.

But if you’re feeling anxious about AI, you’re not alone.

An overwhelming 71 percent of Americans are worried that AI will put vast swaths of the workforce permanently out of a job, according to a new Reuters poll conducted with the firm Ipsos — a proportion that stands in stunning contrast to the absurd levels of hype being blasted out of the AI industry.

The survey, which polled over 4,400 adults this month, also found that 67 percent of respondents believed that AI will have consequences beyond our control. And 47 percent said outright that AI is bad for humanity, compared to less than a third who said that it wasn’t.

Job destruction was one of the top concerns, and for good reason. It’s already happening at a smaller scale, with some CEOs publicly gloating about replacing their workers with AI agents. And industry leaders like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have frequently said their systems could wipe out entire professions and automate parts of the economy. 

But the largest portion of respondents, 77 percent, said that they were concerned about “political chaos” caused by US rivals, such as AI being used to generate disinformation, including videos depicting events that never happened. (Reuters notes how president Trump recently shared an AI-faked video of former president Obama getting arrested in the White House in front of him.) Meanwhile, 61 percent worried about the tech’s voracious electricity demands.

Another recent survey, conducted by advocacy group TechEquity and highlighted by tech journalist Brian Merchant in his newsletter Blood in the Machine, also illustrates Americans’ dampening enthusiasm for a technology propped up by hype. Specifically, it interviewed Californians — whose state, as the home of Silicon Valley, is uniquely positioned to pass laws reining in the industry while federal regulators, under Trump’s direction, are letting them off the leash.

Of the over 1,400 Californians who responded to the survey, 55 percent were more concerned than excited about AI, compared to just 33 percent who said they were excited about the tech. And 59 percent believed that AI will “most likely benefit the wealthiest households and corporations.”

Most striking of all, 70 percent of Californians believed there’s a need for “strong laws” regulating AI and AI companies.

These are damning numbers in a state that, we can’t stress enough, is the locus of the American tech industry and where nearly 1.5 million people are employed by tech companies.

“Californians are more concerned than excited about advancements in AI,” TechEquity CEO Catherine Bracy told Merchant. “Many feel it is advancing too fast, and are concerned about AI-fueled job loss, wage stagnation, privacy violations, and discrimination.”

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‘Godfather of AI’ Warns Superintelligent Machines Could Replace Humanity

Geoffrey Hinton, the pioneering computer scientist called the “Godfather of AI,” has once again sounded the alarm that the very technology he helped bring to life could spell the end of humanity as we know it.

In an interview clip released Aug. 18 as part of the forthcoming film “Making God,” Hinton delivered one of his starkest warnings yet. He said that humanity risks being sidelined—and eventually replaced—by machines far smarter than ourselves.

“Most people aren’t able to comprehend the idea of things more intelligent than us,” Hinton, a Nobel prize-winner for physics and a former Google executive, said in the clip.

“They always think, well, how are we going to use this thing? They don’t think, well, how’s it going to use us?”

Hinton said he is “fairly confident” artificial intelligence will drive massive unemployment, pointing to early examples of tech giants like Microsoft replacing junior programmers with AI. But the larger danger, he said, goes far beyond the workplace.

“The risk I’ve been warning about the most … is the risk that we’ll develop an AI that’s much smarter than us, and it will just take over,” Hinton said.

“It won’t need us anymore.”

The only silver lining, he joked, is that “it won’t eat us, because it’ll be made of silicon.”

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Big Tech Could Soon Use Brain Chips To Read Your Innermost Thoughts: Study

A new study out of Stanford University reveals that neural implants, also known as brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), might not just help paralyzed individuals communicate – they could potentially lay bare your innermost thoughts to Big Tech.

Published in the medical journal Cell, the research shows these devices can decode brain signals to produce synthesized speech faster and with less effort.

BCIs work by using tiny electrode arrays to monitor activity in the brain’s motor cortex, the region controlling speech-related muscles. Until now, the tech relied on signals from paralyzed individuals actively trying to speak. The Stanford team, however, discovered that even imagined speech generates similar, though weaker, signals in the motor cortex. With the help of artificial intelligence, they translated those faint signals into words with up to 74% accuracy from a 125,000-word vocabulary.

“We’re recording the signals as they’re attempting to speak and translating those neural signals into the words that they’re trying to say,” said Erin Kunz, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford’s Neural Prosthetics Translational Laboratory.

But this technological leap has raised red flags among critics who warn of a dystopian future where your private thoughts could be exposed.

Nita Farahany, a Duke University law and philosophy professor and author of The Battle for Your Brain, sounded the alarm telling NPR, “The more we push this research forward, the more transparent our brains become.”

Farahany expressed concern that tech giants like Apple, Google, and Meta could exploit BCIs to access consumers’ minds without consent, urging safeguards like passwords to protect thoughts meant to stay private.

“We have to recognize that this new era of brain transparency really is an entirely new frontier for us,” Farahany said.

While the world fixates on artificial intelligence, some of the tech industry’s heaviest hitters are pouring billions into BCIs. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has raised $1.2 billion for his Neuralink venture, which is now conducting clinical trials with top institutions like the Barrow Neurological Institute, The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis, and the Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi.

Now, another tech titan is entering the fray.

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Automating Pregnancy through Robot Surrogates

The most human of experiences has been automated as China unveiled a new AI robot that is capable of carrying a fetus to full term, replicating the entire pregnancy process from conception to birth. Kaiwa Technology in Guangzhou plans to release these robots in 2026 for $1,400, or a small fraction of what couples pay for surrogates. Has science gone to far in the quest to play God?

These “pregnancy robots” are vastly different from traditional incubators that are utilized for premature or at-risk newborns. The fetus develops within the robot’s artificial womb in synthetic amniotic fluid. Scientists have developed artificial placentas equipped with a tube system operated by AI, which can feed the baby oxygen and nutrients during gestation. Humans have never procreated through an artificial womb nor has a robot replicated the whole gestation process.

Surrogacy was deemed unethical, and the Chinese government banned the practice in 2001. The government prohibited the trade of ova, sperm, embryos, and other related reproductive items. If not outright banned, most nations have a complicated legal framework surrounding surrogacy and parental rights. The Chinese government believes gestational surrogacy exploits women in poverty, and the law recognizes the birthing mother as the legal mother. Still, repealing the one-child policy and infertility have caused a spike in interest.

Some believe this technology will be a breakthrough for couples suffering from infertility. Outside China, same-sex couples could also benefit from AI-driven surrogacy that costs a fraction of the price. Women may not be exploited for their wombs, but what about the babies born to non-human figures?

The mother-child relationship is the genesis of life and creation. The age-old debate of nature v nurture always concludes that both are essential. Scientists conducted a number of unethical studies during the last World War to see what would happen if a baby were deprived of nurture. Naturally, these studies could never be replicated again.

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