“AI – Artificial Intelligence”

Once upon a time, it was relatively easy to spot an email scam. They were flawed. Bad grammar, broken formatting, poor spelling and typos, and a sort of odd cadence often referred to as “Engrish” exposed them for what they were: attempts to extract money from “rich” Americans, most commonly by people outside America. Often the scams seemed reasonable, except when they weren’t, as with the famous Prince of Nigeria scam: send me a couple thousand dollars so I can release my $1.7 million account, and I’ll split it with you. And for a little while they worked, until people’s reason caught up with their greed.

“The most interesting place on the internet” has no humans in it.

It all started innocently enough — like finding a just-crashed meteorite with pink goo in it, opening the mummy’s tomb, or digging up a monolith on the far side of the moon — with an AI meant to actually be useful for your day-to-day living.

By the end of January Grok, the artificial intelligence program developed by Elon Musk’s X platform, will be plunging its digital tentacles into some of the Pentagon’s most heavily classified computer systems and intelligence databases, harvesting “all appropriate data” to provide American war planners with fresh insights.

Opening a back door into the world’s most powerful military for Musk — whose Grok tool is being investigated by the European Union for generating sexual deepfake images — may sound eccentric at best and foolhardy at worst.

But it is only one of the conundrums of a profound but little-heralded revolution that is unfolding at the top of armed forces across the West and beyond.

Amazon is axing 16,000 jobs as it ramps up a push to use artificial intelligence (AI) in the workplace.

“The reductions we are making today will impact approximately 16,000 roles across Amazon, and we’re again working hard to support everyone whose role is impacted,” Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology Beth Galetti said in a Wednesday message to employees.

In early 2024, executives at artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic ramped up an ambitious project they sought to keep quiet. “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” an internal planning document unsealed in legal filings last week said. “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”

Within about a year, according to the filings, the company had spent tens of millions of dollars to acquire and slice the spines off millions of books, before scanning their pages to feed more knowledge into the AI models behind products such as its popular chatbot Claude.

Police are to use AI chatbots to answer calls from potential crime victims as part of an expansion in the use of technology.

The chatbots will be deployed to respond to non-urgent online queries from the public to assess their risk and determine the most appropriate police action.

The move is part of police reforms by Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, that also involve the nationwide rollout of live facial recognition (LFR) cameras.

Engineers studying drone combat at one of China’s top military-linked universities needed a way to simulate clashes between drone swarms in real time. They turned to nature for inspiration.

Observing how hawks select prey, they trained defensive drones to single out and destroy the most vulnerable enemy aircraft. On the other side, the attacking drones were taught how to dodge the hawk-trained defenders based on the behavior of doves. In a five-on-five test, the hawks destroyed all the doves in 5.3 seconds.

That research earned the engineers a patent in April 2024—one of hundreds granted in recent years to Chinese defense companies and universities affiliated with the military for advances in swarm intelligence.

Imagine life in a California suburb in 2035. It’s a Monday morning, and trash cans have been wheeled to the curb for pickup. But not so fast!

Ahead of the garbage truck, now a mostly autonomous vehicle but still carrying a human overseer, there are garbage-sniffing drones. As they hover over still unemptied garbage cans, mechanical tentacles descend, opening the lid. A separate tentacle, packed with sensors, pokes into the garbage. If “organic” material is detected in the trash bin, an enforcement division is alerted, and a citation is issued.

In Toronto, Mac Bauer races streetcars on foot – and he hasn’t lost yet.

Mr. Bauer isn’t interested in proving how fast he can run. His point is that Toronto’s streetcars are too slow. “I don’t like winning. I really don’t. I really, really wish these streetcars were faster than me,” he told the Guardian. “But they’re not. And this is the problem.”

OTTAWA – Canada’s spy watchdog is examining the use and governance of artificial intelligence in national security activities.

The National Security and Intelligence Review Agency has informed key federal ministers and organizations of the study, which will look at how the security community defines, uses and oversees aspects of AI technologies.

Canadian security agencies have used AI for tasks ranging from translation of documents to detection of malware threats.

AI is everywhere.

At the clinic I attended a sign indicated that the Doctor’s notes would be created from the recorded conversation between the physician and myself.