The fight over AI’s harms has played out state by state. One US senator wants to make it federal, all at once. Ed Markey has a long list of worries about artificial intelligence. Thirsty data centres. Workplace surveillance. Biased algorithms. Chatbots…
Humanoid robots learned to walk years ago. The thing still tripping them up is the hand. 1X has given its NEO home robot new hands, and they are the most interesting thing about it. A robot can stride across a stage and still be useless in a kitchen. L…
Walk into a shop with the wrong face on file, and the police could know within four seconds. That is the pitch, and the problem. A facial recognition system in more than 100 UK shops is about to start calling the police in real time. It will fire the m…
This week, two of the world’s biggest car regulators looked at the same question and reached opposite answers. The question is simple. What should sit between a human and a moving vehicle? In the United States, the top auto-safety official floated pull…
Anthropic has built a feature that does something odd for a tech company. It counts how much you lean on its product, then gently suggests you might want to lean a little less. The feature is called Reflect, and it landed in beta on Thursday. It is a d…
The European Parliament has voted to advance a bill letting tech companies legally scan for child sexual abuse material. On Thursday in Strasbourg, lawmakers sent the proposal to EU member states for approval, Politico reports. The twist is that Parlia…
Two 15-year-olds in San Mateo learned this week that a driverless taxi can still tell on you. The pair were drinking alcohol and shooting Orbeez, soft water-filled pellets, out of a moving Waymo on Monday afternoon. The car’s remote monitors spotted it…
A new wave of mandatory safety technology took effect for cars and vans across the EU on 7 July. Every newly manufactured passenger car and van must now carry advanced driver aids, the European Commission has confirmed. The headline additions are an ad…
A few hours after checking into a hotel in New York City, David Streever woke up to a call from the front desk saying someone was looking for him. Streever had just landed on a return trip from Finland, where he’d vacationed with his daughter. Though Streever didn’t know it yet, while he’d been away, […]
Meta is updating its smart glasses to shut off the camera if the recording light has been physically tampered with or destroyed. The change, announced in a 7 July blog post, closes a loophole that let modders turn the glasses into covert recorders. A w…