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""Western partners trusted me to distribute stuff, give them actionable feedback and then adapt the product to Ukrainian conditions," he explains during a trip back to San Francisco to harness help from local software engineers. He still spends part of his time in the fragments of the Donbas region that remain under Ukrainian control, so that he can observe his "customers" - Ukrainian soldiers - in action, in order to develop products they can use. "I like to say this is the world's first open-source war," says Oleg Rogynskyy, 35, another Ukrainian who runs a Silicon Valley start-up. He is also helping the Ukrainian cause and exchanging ideas with other computing engineers on social media sites, message groups such as Signal, and GitHub, the platform where coders exchange ideas."

"Artists say AI image generators are copying their style to make thousands of new images - and it's completely out of their control"

"The more technology helps make us more efficient, the more we are asked to be more efficient. We - our labour, our time, our data - is mined with increasing rapaciousness. Here's my thing with that Keynes essay. Sure, it looks like he was totally wrong about the future. We didn't end up with so much free time that we all went insane. But, then again, we've never actually tested his theory properly. We never just let the machines take over. Clearly, as we're (re)discovering, everyone finds that idea terrifying. I tend to agree. The idea of a completely A.I.-controlled world makes me uneasy. That said, the trend over the last 100 years - and even more since the dawn of this century - doesn't make me feel much better. What seems likelier to me than us all losing our jobs to A.I. is that the way in which we're already being replaced by machines continues is accelerated. That is, that we become ever more tied to the machines, ever more entwined with them. That our lives, bodies, and brains will become ever more machine-like."

"The constitutional right to safe, legal abortion has evaporated following the recent Supreme Court decision. Some states with so-called "trigger bans" have immediately criminalized abortion. Next, Congress may seek to criminalize abortion in all 50 states, putting the government in control of peoples' bodies. Google is fully complicit in the criminalization of people seeking abortion care. That's because Google stores historical location data about hundreds of millions of smartphone users, which it routinely shares with government agencies through "geofence" orders that unmask the identities of anyone who traveled to a specific place at a specific time-like an abortion clinic on a specific day. Google received 11,554 such geofence warrants in 2020."

"Stress is the common factor in many behaviours widely understood to be bad for our health - drinking too much booze, smoking cigarettes, even eating unhealthy food. (There is some evidence to suggest that cortisol - the hormone released when we feel stress - makes us crave high fat and sugary foods.) And, these days, many of life's stressors are communicated via the mobile phone. I cannot stop these stressors, but by turning off notifications, I can at least stop them ambushing me. It's an action that helps me regain some sense of control. For example, when I open up a news app, I am ready to find out what is happening in the world. It is different from being in the supermarket cheese aisle and getting an alert, where - as part of a whole barrage of communications - I may feel blindsided."

"Hu Xijin, a former editor of the ruling Communist Party's Global Times newspaper, warned that the use of the health code for purposes other than epidemic control "damages the authority" of the monitoring system and would chip away at the public's support for it. His post on Weibo, a Twitter-like social media platform, on Monday became a hashtag that was among the most-searched earlier this week, drawing 280 million views."

"Japan isn't the only nation that has struggled to phase out the outdated technology - the U.S. Defense Department only announced in 2019 that it has ended the use of floppy disks, which were first developed in the 1960s, in a control system for its nuclear arsenal. Sony Group Corp. stopped making the disks in 2011 and many young people would struggle to describe how to use one or even identify one in the modern workplace."

"Internet shutdowns are not just used by governments facing civil unrest. Every year millions of internet users from Sudan to Syria, Jordan to India also lose internet access during exam season as governments pull the plug in a bid to avoid hi-tech cheating."

"Researchers put AI normally used to search for helpful drugs into a kind of "bad actor" mode to show how easily it could be abused at a biological arms control conference. All the researchers had to do was tweak their methodology to seek out, rather than weed out toxicity. The AI came up with tens of thousands of new substances, some of which are similar to VX, the most potent nerve agent ever developed. Shaken, they published their findings this month in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence."

"Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks,[3] and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable. This confidence must be well justified and increase with the magnitude of a system's potential effects. OpenAI's recent statement regarding artificial general intelligence, states that "At some point, it may be important to get independent review before starting to train future systems, and for the most advanced efforts to agree to limit the rate of growth of compute used for creating new models." We agree. That point is now."

"Kahun still relies on its own vast repository of medical knowledge - over 30 million insights from trusted sources - but ChatGPT will now allow patients to describe their symptoms in their own words. Until now it's been a structured conversation, with the AI asking a question, the patient responding, and the AI working its way through a series of more detailed questions based on the answers it gets. Integrating ChatGPT puts the patient in control. They describe their symptoms exactly as they would to a doctor, and ChatGPT responds, just as their doctor would."

"For Bejar, the controls in place on social networks like Instagram are not sufficient because they turn "inherently human interactions into an objective assessment". There are too few options for users to hide content or flag comments and DMs and explain why it made them uncomfortable even if it doesn't violate Meta's specific policies, he said. "There's a question of how clearly bad does the content need to be to warrant removal? And that means you set a line somewhere and have to define a criterion where either a computer system or a human can evaluate a piece of content," Bejar said."

"This week, a 16-person narrative design studio has found itself at the centre of a conspiracy theory that holds it responsible for the insidious prevalence of "wokery" in modern video games. A group with more than 200,000 followers on PC games storefront Steam, as well as thousands in a Discord chat channel, believes that Sweet Baby Inc is secretly forcing game developers to change the bodies, ethnicities and sexualities of video game characters to conform to "woke" ideology. They think that Sweet Baby has written and controlled almost every popular video game of the past five years, shutting straight white men out. As Trump once again heads out on the campaign trail, this is part of a broader far right panic about diversity and inclusion that has already resulted in proposed regressive anti-women and anti-woke legislation in the US and elsewhere."

"Instagram has been used to promote sexual violence and exploitation by people advertising themselves as "pimps", a Guardian investigation has found. For the past year, the Guardian has been tracking Instagram accounts hosting content that advocates such activity as well as those that encourage violence against the women under the control of a pimp - someone who makes money from selling others for sex. The accounts identified often use hashtags as well as code phrases commonly associated with sex work to make it easier for buyers to locate them."

"The problem extends beyond the Pegasus project. Installed in Mexico City is one of the largest urban surveillance systems in the Americas: El Centro de Comando, Control, Cómputo, Comunicaciones y Contacto Ciudadano, better known as El C5. The network, connected to panic buttons and command centers, is spread over 1,485 kilometers with software designed to automatically detect license plates. On top of that, the number of installed cameras grew from 18 million to 65 million between 2018 and 2022, with stated plans to add at least an additional 16 million more. Despite its apparent pre-eminence, issues have arisen with the C5, from false identifications to mishandling of personal data. Technological malfunctions have also been shown to impact the outcomes of criminal cases because of the assumption of objectivity that video surveillance supposedly construes. The sprawling C5 system is dwarfed only by the Titan, an expansive intelligence and security database, both in terms of scale and threat to civil liberties. The software is used by several Mexican state governments to combine location data with other private information, including financial, government, and telecom data, to geolocate individuals across the country in real time. Governmental officials have been criticized for the controversial use of the database to target public figures, but, more problematically, access to Titan-enabled intel can be gained through an underground market, making it a further liability. The extent to which artificial intelligence has been incorporated into the C5 and Titan is still not clear, but the specter of surveillance remains large and is set to cause more worries with the addition of new smart technologies."

"It's hardly a surprise that Meta, owner of Facebook, is refusing to renew its deals with Australia's media companies. It was always grudging in its negotiations and never really accepted the principle that it should pay for the benefit of using the work of journalists. Facebook and Google were forced to the bargaining table by the news media bargaining code. That law allowed the government to "designate" digital platforms, which would force them to negotiate with media companies. The big stick was that if the parties could not agree, the decision would be made by an independent arbiter. In other words, Google and Facebook would lose control."

"On a zoomed-out time scale, technological progress follows an exponential curve. Compare how the world looked 15 years ago (no smartphones, really), 150 years ago (no combustion engine, no home electricity), 1,500 years ago (no industrial machines), and 15,000 years ago (no agriculture). The coming change will center around the most impressive of our capabilities: the phenomenal ability to think, create, understand, and reason. To the three great technological revolutions-the agricultural, the industrial, and the computational-we will add a fourth: the AI revolution. This revolution will generate enough wealth for everyone to have what they need, if we as a society manage it responsibly. The technological progress we make in the next 100 years will be far larger than all we've made since we first controlled fire and invented the wheel. We have already built AI systems that can learn and do useful things. They are still primitive, but the trendlines are clear."

"And even without parental anxiety hemming them in: where are teens to go? In the last decade, YMCA data shows that more than 4,500 youth work jobs have been cut and 750 youth centres shut down. According to the Music Venue Trust, two grassroots music venues are closing every week. The nightclub industry is in freefall. Teenagers can't hang around in parks without arousing the suspicion of overprotective adults who have decided these rare recreational spaces belong to their toddlers alone; city squares and skate parks and pedestrian zones that were once public are now being insidiously privatised, monitored via CCTV and policed by private security guards. No wonder then, that teens withdraw to online video game worlds, the last spaces they have left that remain unmediated by their parents or other authority figures - the last places where they are mostly beyond the reach of adult control."

"But do these options make Bluesky a more prosocial experience? Prosocial design is a "set of design patterns, features and processes which foster healthy interactions between individuals and which create the conditions for those interactions to thrive by ensuring individuals' safety, wellbeing and dignity," according to the Prosocial Design Network. Giving users control over their feeds is a step in this direction, but it's not a new concept. The Panotpykon Foundation's Safe by Default briefing advocates for human-centric recommender systems that prioritize conscious user choice and empowerment. They propose features like: Sliders for content preferences (e.g., informative vs. entertaining content), A "hard stop" button to suppress unwanted content, and Prompts for users to define their interests or preferences."

"There has also been, he says, "a real push in opinion pieces and popular-press books that are sloppy scientifically but stated so confidently. The ideas in these books are not peer-reviewed." The published studies they cite tend to have small samples and no control groups, and to be based on associations rather than proving cause. "People will say: 'The iPhone was invented in 2007 and Instagram became popular in 2012 and, oh my God, look, tech use has gone up at the same time mental health has gone down!' It seems like common sense - that's why you have this kind of consensus. But it just isn't scientific." In 2023, Przybylski and his colleagues looked at data from almost 12,000 children in the US aged between nine and 12 and found no impact from screen time on functional connectivity ("how different parts of the brain kind of talk to each other", he explains), as measured with fMRI scans while the children completed tasks. They also found no negative impact on the children's self-reported wellbeing. "If you publish a study like we do, where we cross our Ts, we dot our Is, we state our hypotheses before we see the data, we share the data and the code, those types of studies don't show the negative effects that we expect to see.""