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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Mosquitoes' thirst for human blood has increased as biodiversity loss worsens

Stretching along the Brazilian coastline, the Atlantic Forest is home to hundreds of species of birds, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and fishes. However, due to human expansion, only about a third of the forest's original area remains intact.

As human presence drives animals from their habitats, mosquitoes that once fed on a wide variety of hosts might be finding new, human targets to quench their thirst for blood, finds a study in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

"Here we show that the mosquito species we captured in remnants of the Atlantic Forest have a clear preference for feeding on humans," said senior author Dr. Jeronimo Alencar, a biologist at the Oswaldo Cruz Institute in Rio de Janeiro.

"This is crucial, because in an environment like the Atlantic Forest with a great diversity of potential vertebrate hosts, a preference for humans significantly enhances the risk of pathogen transmission," added co-author Dr. Sergio Machado, a researcher who studies microbiology and immunology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

[...] Out of a total of 1,714 captured mosquitoes belonging to 52 species, 145 females were engorged with blood. Blood meals consumed by 24 of those mosquitoes could be identified and were sourced from 18 humans, one amphibian, six birds, one canid, and one mouse. Some blood meals were made up of multiple sources; the meal of a mosquito identified as Cq. Venezuelensis was made up of amphibian and human blood. Mosquitoes belonging to the species Cq. Fasciolata fed on both a rodent and a bird as well as a bird and a human, respectively.

upstart writes:

New Studies Can Explain Why Comet 3I/Atlas Isn't An Alien (Probably):

When some scientists and conspiracy theorists saw the strange trajectory of the space object 3I/ATLAS, some of them thought one thing: aliens. With a bizarre shape, an unusually precise trajectory, and unpredictable acceleration patterns, several observers believed 3I/ATLAS was of extraterrestrial design. But a new paper might provide some much needed clues about the origins of this strange object. Spoiler alert: It likely isn't an alien.

Submitted to Research Notes of the AAS, the paper likens the behavior of 3I/ATLAS to that of other comets zooming through our solar system, linking its abnormal flight patterns to a phenomenon called outgassing, which can change speed, spin, and orbit trajectory. According to the paper's author Marshall Eubanks, the team measured the objects non-gravitational acceleration through two interplanetary spacecraft. The results, according to Eubanks, showed that the object followed typical patterns of other comets flying through our solar system.

The paper largely debunks months of speculation, during which a group of Harvard astrophysicists speculated that 3I/ATLAS might be a piece of alien technology. Avi Loeb, a Harvard astrophysicist, even discussed the possibility on the Joe Rogan podcast after releasing a draft paper on the subject in July 2025. [...]

[...] Speculation that 3I/ATLAS could be an interplanetary, alien visitor were rooted in these highly unique characteristics, especially its unique flight pattern. According to Avi Loeb's paper – titled "Is the Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Alien Technology?" — the comet's trajectory is highly improbable, taking a route that passes strangely close to Venus, Jupiter, and Mars, which Loeb's team determined would only occur 0.005% of the time. Further unlikely irregularities, such as its unique retrograde orbital plane and a perihelion, or point in which the comet is closest to the sun, that conveniently occurs when Earth is on the other side, obstructing it from view, testified to Loeb's theory of interstellar travel. Written largely as a theoretical exercise, the paper explored the popular "Dark Forest" theory, in which human's lack of extraterrestrial evidence is an intentional strategy by hostile, silent intergalactic neighbors. With this assumption, Loeb's team hypothesized that the object's unique properties, including its obstructed perihelion, pointed towards the possibility of an alien species conducting a clandestine mission within our solar system.

fliptop writes:

Automotive giant Stellantis will stop selling its plug-in hybrid electric Jeep Wrangler and Grand Cherokee models and Chrysler Pacifica minivans in the United States amid sluggish electric vehicle sales, the company announced on Friday:

"Stellantis will phase out plug-in hybrid programs in North America beginning with the 2026 model year, and focus on more competitive electrified solutions, including hybrid and range-extended vehicles," the company said.

[...] Stellantis's decision comes three months after Chrysler recalled more than 320,000 Jeep plug-in hybrids in the United States and 20,000 Jeeps in Canada over concerns of a battery that could catch fire even when the vehicle was not running. The recall applied to Jeep Wranglers from 2021 to 2025, and Jeep Grand Cherokees from 2022 to 2025.

[...] In other company news, Stellantis announced on Friday it was partnering with Bolt, Europe's leading mobility platform, to explore the development of driverless autonomous vehicles for commercial operations across Europe.

Related:

• US EV Sales Will Collapse 60% In October, J.D. Power Forecasts
• GM to Take $1.6 Billion Hit as It Scales Back Electric Vehicle Operations
• Canadian EV Sales Collapse by 35% as Gas Car Purchases Surge
• Stellantis Lays Off Thousands of Workers after Pocketing Hundreds of Millions in EV Subsidies

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Analysis centers on point of attachment of ligament vital to walking upright:

In recent decades, scientists have debated whether a seven-million-year-old fossil was bipedal—a trait that would make it the oldest human ancestor. A new analysis by a team of anthropologists offers powerful evidence that Sahelanthropus tchadensis—a species discovered in the early 2000s—was indeed bipedal by uncovering a feature found only in bipedal hominins.

Using 3D technology and other methods, the team identified Sahelanthropus's femoral tubercle, which is the point of attachment for the largest and most powerful ligament in the human body—the iliofemoral ligament—and vital for walking upright. The analysis also confirmed the presence of other traits in Sahelanthropus that are linked to bipedalism.

"Sahelanthropus tchadensis was essentially a bipedal ape that possessed a chimpanzee-sized brain and likely spent a significant portion of its time in trees, foraging and seeking safety," says Scott Williams, an associate professor in New York University's Department of Anthropology who led the research. "Despite its superficial appearance, Sahelanthropus was adapted to using bipedal posture and movement on the ground."

[...] Sahelanthropus was discovered in Chad's Djurab desert by University of Poitiers' palaeontologists in the early 2000s, with initial analyses focusing on its skull. Two decades later, studies on other parts of that discovery—its forearms, or ulnae, and thigh bone, or femur—were reported. This prompted debate over whether the species was bipedal or not, leaving open the question on its status: Is Sahelanthropus a hominin (a human ancestor)?

[...] In the Science Advances study, the scientists took a closer look at the ulnae and femur using two primary methods: a multi-fold trait comparison with the same bones of living and fossil species and 3D geometric morphometrics—a standard method for analyzing shapes in greater detail in order to illuminate areas of particular interest. Among the compared fossil species was Australopithecus—an early human ancestor, well-known through the discovery of the "Lucy" skeleton in the early 1970s, who lived an estimated four to two million years ago.

[...] "Our analysis of these fossils offers direct evident that Sahelanthropus tchadensis could walk on two legs, demonstrating that bipedalism evolved early in our lineage and from an ancestor that looked most similar to today's chimpanzees and bonobos," concludes Williams.

Journal Reference: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adv0130

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

This release also introduces new System Information and System Administration tools, as well as updates to existing tools:

Delayed a bit due to the Christmas and New Year's holidays, but Linux Mint 22.3 "Zena" is now available for download as the Linux Mint team has just started publishing the final ISO images on the official mirrors.

Based on the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat) operating system series and powered by Linux kernel 6.14, which should boost hardware support, Linux Mint 22.3 "Zena" ships with the usual editions featuring the Cinnamon 6.6, Xfce 4.18, and MATE 1.26 desktop environments.

As you can see, the biggest attraction of the Linux Mint 22.3 release is the latest Cinnamon 6.6 desktop, which introduces a redesigned application menu applet, modernized keyboard handling, virtual keyboard improvements, improved theme support, updated applets, and much more.

Linux Mint 22.3 also introduces new System Information and System Administration tools, per-app panel notification indicators, an always-on Night Light feature, the ability to pause snapshots in the Timeshift backup tool and file operations in the Nemo file manager, and support for XApp Symbolic Icons (XSI).
"Symbolic icons are simple, monochrome icons used throughout applications for buttons, menus, and status indicators. They scale cleanly at different sizes and remain clear in both light and dark interface themes," said the Linux Mint developers.

Among other changes, Linux Mint 22.3 updates the Warpinator app with IPv6 support and the ability to send text messages, updates the Hypnotix IPTV player app with the ability to hide the mouse cursor in full-screen and forward keys towards MPV,

It also updates Captain, the suite of tools created by the Linux Mint for modern package management, to handle the installation of multiple packages via apt:// URLs, as well as the Update Manager utility to show a warning icon in the system tray if a restart is recommended after applying updates.

Last but not least, Linux Mint 22.3 adds a new "Include All" button to the mintbackup tool to make it easier for users to add all hidden files and folders before making a backup. Of course, this release also includes all the package updates and security patches from the upstream Ubuntu 24.04 LTS repositories.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

MIT physicists propose that under certain conditions, a magnetic material's electrons could splinter into fractions of themselves to form quasiparticles known as "anyons":

In the past year, two separate experiments in two different materials captured the same confounding scenario: the coexistence of superconductivity and magnetism. Scientists had assumed that these two quantum states are mutually exclusive; the presence of one should inherently destroy the other.

Now, theoretical physicists at MIT have an explanation for how this Jekyll-and-Hyde duality could emerge. In a paper appearing today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team proposes that under certain conditions, a magnetic material's electrons could splinter into fractions of themselves to form quasiparticles known as "anyons." In certain fractions, the quasiparticles should flow together without friction, similar to how regular electrons can pair up to flow in conventional superconductors.

If the team's scenario is correct, it would introduce an entirely new form of superconductivity — one that persists in the presence of magnetism and involves a supercurrent of exotic anyons rather than everyday electrons.

"Many more experiments are needed before one can declare victory," says study lead author Senthil Todadri, the William and Emma Rogers Professor of Physics at MIT. "But this theory is very promising and shows that there can be new ways in which the phenomenon of superconductivity can arise."

What's more, if the idea of superconducting anyons can be confirmed and controlled in other materials, it could provide a new way to design stable qubits — atomic-scale "bits" that interact quantum mechanically to process information and carry out complex computations far more efficiently than conventional computer bits.

[...] Anyons are entirely different from the two main types of particles that make up the universe: bosons and fermions. Bosons are the extroverted particle type, as they prefer to be together and travel in packs. The photon is the classic example of a boson. In contrast, fermions prefer to keep to themselves, and repel each other if they are too near. Electrons, protons, and neutrons are examples of fermions. Together, bosons and fermions are the two major kingdoms of particles that make up matter in the three-dimensional universe.

canopic jug writes:

Bruce Schneier, the cryptographer and privacy specialist, and J B Branch, an accountability advocate at Public Citizen, have written a post about AI and the Corporate Capture of Knowledge. They raise hard questions about what happened to Aaron Swartz in the context of the what is going on with artificial intelligence, copyright, and ultimately the control of knowledge:

As AI becomes a larger part of America's economy, one can see the writing on the wall. Judges will twist themselves into knots to justify an innovative technology premised on literally stealing the works of artists, poets, musicians, all of academia and the internet, and vast expanses of literature. But if Swartz's actions were criminal, it is worth asking: What standard are we now applying to AI companies?

The question is not simply whether copyright law applies to AI. It is why the law appears to operate so differently depending on who is doing the extracting and for what purpose.

The stakes extend beyond copyright law or past injustices. They concern who controls the infrastructure of knowledge going forward and what that control means for democratic participation, accountability and public trust.

The questions they raise are important questions because the foundation of democracy is being able to make informed decisions through participation in civilized, well-rounded discussions. The prerequisite for that is knowledge.

Previously:
(2025) OpenAI Desperate to Avoid Explaining Why It Deleted Pirated Book Datasets
(2025) Meta Pirated and Seeded Porn for Years to Train AI, Lawsuit Says
(2025) Creating AI Based Entirely on Ethically-Sourced Data
(2025) Copyright Office Thinks AI Companies Sometimes Stole Content
(2024) OpenAI Whistleblower Found Dead in San Francisco Apartment
(2024) OpenAI Blamed NYT for Tech Problem Erasing Evidence of Copyright Abuse
(2024) AI Companies Are Finally Being Forced To Cough Up For Training Data
and more ...

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

EU-only ops, German subsidiaries, and a pinky promise your data won't end up in Uncle Sam's hands:

Amid continued trade and geopolitical volatility between Europe and the US, Amazon Web Services is making its European Sovereign Cloud generally available today and plans to expand so-called Local Zones.

Amazon says the cloud is "entirely located within the EU, and physically and logically separate from other AWS Regions." It will initially offer 90 services from compute to database, networking, security, storage, and AI.

It is "independently operated" by EU residents and "backed by strong technical controls, sovereign assurances, and legal protections designed to meet the needs of European governments and enterprises for sensitive data." Only authorized AWS staff running the European Sovereign Cloud will have access to a "replica of the source code needed to maintain" services.

The footprint of this cloud is being extended from the AWS Region in Germany across the EU to allay customers' concerns. Belgium, the Netherlands, and Portugal are set to kick off AWS Local Zones.

AWS says customers with more stringent requirements for data isolation or data residency can use its Dedicated Local Zones, AI Factories, or Outposts in the preferred locations they select, including on-prem.

For the uninitiated, AWS Local Zones are built to provide low-latency access to services in specific cities. This same capability is provided by AWS Dedicated Local Zones, but these are created for the exclusive use by one customer or community so by their nature are meant to offer additional security, governance and data residency features for sovereign workloads.

Customers will keep all metadata they create (roles, permissions, resource labels, and configurations) only in the EU, including sovereign Identity and Access Management (IAM), billing, and usage metering systems.

EU citizens "obligated to abide by European law" will run a new parent company and three local subsidiaries incorporated in Germany that manage the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. An advisory board was also set up, comprising three Amazon staff and two independent board members.

looorg writes:

Apparently there is a new app. If you don't use your phone enough or if there is no activity it informs your next of kin that you might be dead.

A new bleak-sounding app has taken China by storm.

Named Are You Dead? the concept is simple. You need to check in with it every two days – clicking a large button – to confirm that you are alive. If not, it will get in touch with your appointed emergency contact and inform them that you may be in trouble.

It was launched in May last year to not much fanfare but attention around it has exploded in recent weeks with many young people, who live alone in Chinese cities, downloading it in droves.

The app, which is listed internationally under the name Demumu, ranks in the top two in the US, Singapore and Hong Kong, and top four in Australia and Spain for paid utility apps - possibly driven by Chinese users living overseas.

Still if you are so lonely and have no friends or family. Who will it contact? Is the contact then "big-brother"?

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/are-you-dead-viral-chinese-app-changing-its-name/
https://www.euronews.com/next/2026/01/14/what-is-the-are-you-dead-app-and-why-is-it-so-popular-in-china-and-beyond
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3381r5nnn6o

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The Absurd Pirate's Internet Blog asks, is gen alpha screwed?:

However, I do think there is a STARK contrast between a curated show from the 90s-00s and a show like Cocomelon that is designed to be like heroin for babies. I walked in on my MIL and daughter watching Cocomelon together one time, and it was jarring seeing how, for one, low effort the animation and songs are, and two, how stimulating this show is, between the incredibly saturated colors to the jump cuts every second. What I learned was that this show uses focus groups of children to make it so there is not a break in the concentration. If a kid shifts his eyes away from the screen, the scene gets edited to address that.

Companies are literally designing everything for addiction these days. Trying to get you hooked on whatever they can profit off of as early in your development as possible.

The points raised there are discussed further by Andre Franca. He adds,

The author also mentions the "mental death" of parenting under modern life, and I totally get that. There are days when I'm so drained that a screen feels like a life raft, so the comparison of high-stimulant shows to "baby heroin" makes total sense to me. That crap is bad enough for an adult; for a child, it can be devastating. I've watched my oldest son's behavior shift in real-time depending on what he's consuming. When it's junk, he turns into different person - more reactive, less patient. It makes me realize that parenting today is largely about shielding them from a culture that wants to outsource their development to an algorithm.

What happens when a substantial portion of a whole generation achieves an age of majority with an nearly complete substitution of life experience for exposure to mindless digital heroin?

Previously:
(2025) Ban Social Media for Under 15s, Says French Report Warning of TikTok Dangers
(2025) Social Media Is Dead – Here's What Comes Next
(2015) Kids These Days: Six or Seven Nicknamed Generations

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

It's no surprise to see similar designs appearing in Ukraine's interceptor drone fleets:

It's rare that drone hobbyists can hang with the professionals, especially when it comes to setting records. But hobbyist drone developer and videographer Luke Bell and his dad have recaptured the world record for the world's fastest first-person drone, reaching 408 miles per hour [657 km/hr -Ed.].

The Bells have been competing in this niche game of record-breaking cat-and-drone for the past year. As TechSpot details, they set a record just shy of 300 miles per hour in June 2025, only for fellow YouTube content creator Samgo to hit 346mph with his Fastboy 2. The Bells responded with a new design of their own that upgraded cooling, aerodynamics, and power, managing 363mph, only for professional drone videographers Ben Biggs and Aiden Kelley to steal the crown with a new 389mph drone flight.

Now, the Bells are back, and this time they're smashing through the ceiling. Their latest design uses new motors, a new aerodynamic chassis, and trimmed rotors to achieve the latest milestone record: 408mph.

To really show off their achievements, they built a second version of the drone and fitted it with a 360-degree camera so it could capture incredible second-hand footage of the world's fastest FPV drone. It makes a fantastic whine noise as it flies past observers, almost too fast to see.

I don't typically follow consumer drone developments, but having kept an eye on Ukraine's own innovations in this space over the past few years, it's fascinating to see this style of drone in Ukraine's Wild Hornet Sting drone interceptor. Notable for their ability to catch up to some of Russia's jet-powered one-way-attack drones, you have to imagine that Ukrainian developers will be keen to see if they can make similar speed advances to improve the interception rate moving forward.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Pluralistic: Sorry, eh (13 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow:

Like all the best Americans, I'm Canadian, and while I have lived abroad for most of this century, I still hew faithfully to our folkways, which is why I'd like to start this essay by apologizing.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry! I'm a technology writer, which means I'm supposed to be encouraging you to throw hundreds of billions of dollars at the money-losingest technology in human history, AI. No one has ever lost as much money as the AI companies.

There is no way to operate one of Nvidia's big AI-optimized GPUs without losing money. The owners of these GPUs who have lost the least money are the ones who rushed into buying GPUs without ensuring they'd have electricity to power them, and have been forced to leave their GPUs to age in warehouses. The minute they plug in those GPUs, they'll start losing money, and the more they use them, the more money they'll lose.

I'm sorry. As a technology writer, I'm supposed to be telling you that this bet will some day pay off, because one day we will have shoveled so many words into the word-guessing program that it wakes up and learns how to actually do the jobs it is failing spectacularly at today. This is a proposition akin to the idea that if we keep breeding horses to run faster and faster, one of them will give birth to a locomotive. Humans possess intelligence, and machines do not. The difference between a human and a word-guessing program isn't how many words the human knows.

I'm sorry. I know that when we talk about "digital sovereignty," we're obliged to talk about how we can build more data-centres that we can fill up with money-losing chips from American silicon monopolists in the hopes of destroying as many jobs as possible while blowing through our clean energy goals and enshittifying as much of our potable water as possible.

I don't have any advice for how to do that. I'm sorry!

As Canada contemplates our response to the collapse of the American empire and its alliances with the world, the cornerstone of our current strategy is sacrificing our dollars, water and energy in order to become more dependent on America, in a weird and improbable bet that we will figure out how to make millions of Canadians unemployed. I'm sorry, that just doesn't sound like a great idea to me.

If I can beg your indulgence, I'd like to propose an alternative.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Study of 20 years of kernel history finds bugs hide for 2+ years on average, some for decades:

It was not too long ago we talked about the first Rust CVE in the Linux kernel, which caused system crashes. That same day, 159 other CVEs were issued for C code. While that shows progress with Rust, it also highlights something more concerning; the kernel has bugs that hide for years before anyone finds them.

A research blog published on Pebblebed demonstrates how bugs often stay hidden for years before they are discovered and fixed.

Jenny Guanni Qu, a researcher at Pebblebed, analyzed 125,183 bugs from 20 years of Linux kernel development history (on Git). The findings show that the average bug takes 2.1 years to find. The longest-lived bug, a buffer overflow in networking code, went unnoticed for 20.7 years!

The research was carried out by relying on the Fixes: tag that is used in kernel development. Basically, when a commit fixes a bug, it includes a tag pointing to the commit that introduced the bug.

Jenny wrote a tool that extracted these tags from the kernel's git history going back to 2005. The tool finds all fixing commits, extracts the referenced commit hash, pulls dates from both commits, and calculates the time frame.

As for the dataset, it includes over 125k records from Linux 6.19-rc3, covering bugs from April 2005 to January 2026. Out of these, 119,449 were unique fixing commits from 9,159 different authors, and only 158 bugs had CVE IDs assigned.

Plus, she found out that different parts of the kernel show significant variation in how long bugs remain hidden. CAN bus drivers have the longest average at 4.2 years, followed by SCTP networking at 4.0 years. GPU bugs get caught fastest at 1.4 years, and BPF bugs are found within 1.1 years.

The research also found that incomplete fixes are common. Someone notices undefined behavior and ships a fix, but the fix does not fully address the problem. In one case, a 2024 fix for netfilter set field validation was incomplete, and a security researcher found a bypass a year later.

Jenny's research goes much deeper than what I covered here. She has also developed an AI model called VulnBERT that predicts whether a commit introduces a vulnerability. The detailed blog post linked above includes elaborate technical explanations on that; it is a must-read!

Original Submission

jelizondo writes:

phys.org published an interesting article about a new hypothesis regarding the existence of worm holes:

Wormholes are often imagined as tunnels through space or time—shortcuts across the universe. But this image rests on a misunderstanding of work by physicists Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen.

In 1935, while studying the behavior of particles in regions of extreme gravity, Einstein and Rosen introduced what they called a "bridge": a mathematical link between two perfectly symmetrical copies of spacetime. It was not intended as a passage for travel, but as a way to maintain consistency between gravity and quantum physics. Only later did Einstein–Rosen bridges become associated with wormholes, despite having little to do with the original idea.

But in new research published in Classical and Quantum Gravity, my colleagues and I show that the original Einstein–Rosen bridge points to something far stranger—and more fundamental—than a wormhole.

The puzzle Einstein and Rosen were addressing was never about space travel, but about how quantum fields behave in curved spacetime. Interpreted this way, the Einstein–Rosen bridge acts as a mirror in spacetime: a connection between two microscopic arrows of time.

Quantum mechanics governs nature at the smallest scales such as particles, while Einstein's theory of general relativity applies to gravity and spacetime. Reconciling the two remains one of physics' deepest challenges. And excitingly, our reinterpretation may offer a path to doing this.

The "wormhole" interpretation emerged decades after Einstein and Rosen's work, when physicists speculated about crossing from one side of spacetime to the other, most notably in the late-1980s research.

But those same analyses also made clear how speculative the idea was: within general relativity, such a journey is forbidden. The bridge pinches off faster than light could traverse it, rendering it non-traversable. Einstein–Rosen bridges are therefore unstable and unobservable—mathematical structures, not portals.

Yet there is no observational evidence for macroscopic wormholes, nor any compelling theoretical reason to expect them within Einstein's theory. While speculative extensions of physics—such as exotic forms of matter or modifications of general relativity—have been proposed to support such structures, they remain untested and highly conjectural.

Our recent work revisits the Einstein–Rosen bridge puzzle using a modern quantum interpretation of time, building on ideas developed by Sravan Kumar and João Marto.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.techradar.com/ai-platforms-assistants/society-cannot-function-if-no-one-is-accountable-for-ai-jaron-lanier-the-godfather-of-virtual-reality-discusses-how-far-our-empathy-should-extend-to-ai-in-episode-two-of-new-podcast-the-ten-reckonings

'Society cannot function if no one is accountable for AI' — Jaron Lanier, the godfather of virtual reality

Whether we like it or not, we can't ignore AI. What started as a fun, gimmicky chatbot on our desktops, albeit one that could talk a bit like a human, is already taking jobs, accessing medical records, and reshaping workplaces. We are rapidly approaching the point where the practical realities of building and governing advanced AI systems must be confronted.

As the recent furor over indecent Grok-generated images on X, and the use of Meta AI smart glasses to record women without their permission for social media clicks has shown, the guardrails meant to help society cope with the deluge of AI devices and new technologies seem seriously lacking.

Even before the latest controversies around AI-generated images, one of the biggest shocks to me was the way some AI companies decided it was perfectly acceptable to train their models on copyrighted material from authors and artists without permission – and the fact that, despite a few lingering lawsuits, they appear to have faced few consequences so far.

All of this makes me wonder whether we're really ready for a world in which AI runs everything with zero accountability. Two people who have been grappling with similar questions are technologist Jaron Lanier and Dr Ben Goertzel, CEO of SingularityNET and founder of the ASI Alliance, in the next upcoming episode of The Ten Reckonings podcast. [5:17 --JE]

This new episode forms part of a series where these issues are explored in depth. According to Goertzel, "The ASI Alliance's purpose is not to present a unified position, but to create space for the world's leading thinkers to openly debate and, in doing so, help society reckon with the profound choices ahead."