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In “Never Let Me Go,” the clones hold up a mirror to the reader (like them, we are all dead in the long run), but so, too, do the noncloned characters, the ordinary human beings who accept with equanimity the wholesale slaughter of their fabricated counterparts. How could this be?

At one time, we learn, there was a public outcry after news of the appalling conditions in which clones were reared got out, but because no one was willing to return to a world without an endless supply of organs — a world where cancer and heart disease remained incurable — discussions of systemic change came to nothing. Instead Hailsham, the progressive boarding school, was founded, an incremental half measure that allowed people to ventilate their guilt without substantially changing the status quo.

Clones would still be bred for death, but a few of them were now given the chance to read poetry and make art in a pleasant rural setting before the time came to go under the knife.

In audio and video clips that have reached millions of viewers over the past month on TikTok, X, Instagram and YouTube, the führer’s AI-cloned voice quavers and crescendos as he delivers English-language versions of some of his most notorious addresses, including his 1939 Reichstag speech predicting the end of Jewish people in Europe. Some seeking to spread the practice of making Hitler videos have hosted online trainings.

Extremists are using artificial intelligence to reanimate Adolf Hitler online for a new generation, recasting the Nazi German leader who orchestrated the Holocaust as a “misunderstood” figure whose antisemitic and anti-immigrant messages are freshly resonant in politics today.

The posts, which make use of cheap and popular AI voice-cloning tools, have drawn praise in comments on X and TikTok, such as “I miss you uncle A,” “He was a hero,” and “Maybe he is NOT the villain.” On Telegram and the “dark web,” extremists brag that the AI-manipulated speeches offer an engaging and effortless way to repackage Hitler’s ideas to radicalize young people.

What I’ve learned is that interacting with A.I. voice agents will change how we interact with one another: who we trust, what we expect and what we need in our communications. A.I. voice agents are already infiltrating our world: calling us as telemarketers, taking our orders at fast-food drive-throughs, listening to our problems as A.I. therapists or — and this one really hits home, given my occupation — being employed as A.I. podcast hosts.

Voice agents have also been touted as a solution to the loneliness epidemic. But when I called a friend of mine and unleashed the A.I. version of me, he later offered the most succinct description of what the whole experience felt like: “It’s so lonely,” he lamented. That sense of loneliness — the base reality that, fundamentally, you are only talking to yourself — may be the most lasting result of all these A.I. conversations.

A.I. agents are already triggering an avalanche of synthetic conversation, as they are deployed as tireless, unflagging talkers, capable of endless invented chatter. As they improve, it will become increasingly difficult to distinguish these A.I. voice agents from humans and, even when you can identify them, you will still be forced to talk to them.

George Church, a Harvard University geneticist who is also working on de-extinction of mammoths, suggests that reintroducing the mammoth to tundra regions could help bring back the ancient dry, grassy "mammoth steppe" ecosystem shaped by their grazing.

Herds of woolly mammoths could be lumbering across the Canadian tundra in the near future if a Korean company's project works out.

While some scientists think bringing back mammoths is an exciting possibility that could benefit the environment, others have reservations.

The last time we found ourselves facing such widespread social change wrought by technology was the onset of the Web 2.0 era in the mid-2000s.

Those innovative services, however, came at a steep cost. What we initially conceived of as free services were monetized through extensive surveillance of the people and businesses that used them. The result has been an online economy where access to increasingly essential services is conditioned on the widespread hoarding and sale of our personal data.

These business models drove companies to develop endlessly invasive ways to track us, and the Federal Trade Commission would later find reason to believe that several of these companies had broken the law

Creating and disseminating convincing propaganda used to require the resources of a state. Now all it takes is a smartphone.

Generative artificial intelligence is now capable of creating fake pictures, clones of our voices, and even videos depicting and distorting world events. The result: From our personal circles to the political circuses, everyone must now question whether what they see and hear is true.

exposure to AI-generated fakes can make us question the authenticity of everything we see. Real images and real recordings can be dismissed as fake. 

New York Mayor Eric Adams doesn’t speak Spanish. But it sure sounds like he does.He’s been using artificial intelligence software to send prerecorded calls about city events to residents in Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Urdu and Yiddish. The voice in the messages mimics the mayor but was generated with AI software from a company called ElevenLabs.

Experts have warned for years that AI will change our democracy by distorting reality. That future is already here. AI is being used to fabricate voices, fundraising emails and “deepfake” images of events that never occurred.

I’m writing this to urge elected officials, candidates and their supporters to pledge not to use AI to deceive voters. I’m not suggesting a ban, but rather calling for politicians to commit to some common values while our democracy adjusts to a world with AI.

BRUSSELS — The United States announced a package of new sanctions against Russia and further aid for Ukrainian refugees as President Joe Biden looked to rally the leaders of some of the world’s most powerful democracies to increase their efforts to help Ukraine in a series of high-stakes meetings.

with a focus on those who are most vulnerable. The administration is also prepared to offer more than $1 billion in additional funding toward humanitarian assistance and $11 billion over the next five years to address worldwide food security threats after the disruptions to the Russian and the Ukrainian agricultural industries.

While the U.S. announced new efforts around sanctions and refugees, it made no new military commitments — despite pleas from Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

What exactly are they afraid of? How do you draw a line from a chatbot to global destruction

This tribe feels we have made three crucial errors: giving the AI the capability to write code, connecting it to the internet and teaching it about human psychology. In those steps we have created a self-improving, potentially manipulative entity that can use the network to achieve its ends — which may not align with ours

This is a technology that learns from our every interaction with it. In an eerie glimpse of AI’s single-mindedness, OpenAI revealed in a paper that GPT-4 was willing to lie, telling a human online it was a blind person, to get a task done.

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“Each building can only be in the place that it is located,”

“That place involves the climate, the topography, the history, the culture, and the landscape, including the sky and the stars. Yet you don’t have to be from that place to experience it, to feel uplifted, or feel at peace, or feel emotional, or feel good.” Put differently, RCR Arquitectes stands in as a metaphor for appreciating otherness in the world.

have we run out of things to say and write that actually are about technology and the companies behind them? Or do we feel compelled to fill the white space between what matters? Sort of like talk radio?

There have been three big innovation narratives in the last few years that complicate, but don't invalidate, my thesis. The first -- The Rise of the Cloud -- was essentially a rebranding of having data on the Internet, which is, well ... what the Internet has always been about. Though I think it has made the lives of some IT managers easier and I do like Rdio. The second, Big Data, has lots of potential applications. But, as Tim Berners-Lee noted today, the people benefiting from more sophisticated machine learning techniques are the people buying consumer data, not the consumers themselves. How many Big Data startups might help people see their lives in different ways? Perhaps the personal genomics companies, but so far, they've kept their efforts focused quite narrowly. And third, we have the daily deal phenomenon. Groupon and its 600 clones may or may not be good companies, but they are barely technology companies. Really, they look like retail sales operations with tons of sales people and marketing expenses.

we've reached a point in this technology cycle where the old thing has run its course. I think the hardware, cellular bandwidth, and the business model of this tottering tower of technology are pushing companies to play on one small corner of a huge field.

TIJUANA, Mexico — More than a hundred migrants who made a grueling journey to the U.S. border were stranded on the last leg of their trip on Monday as they waited to plead their case to seek asylum after immigration officials said the crossing was at capacit

How long the asylum seekers will have to wait to plead their case is just the beginning of the uncertain and potentially monthslong process ahead of them. The port of entry remained at capacity Monday morning, an official with Customs and Border Protection said in a statement.

She broke down crying the day before after learning she would not be allowed to make her claim for asylum that day. She said she was seeking asylum after gang members came after her and her daughter because her boyfriend owed them money.

back online a month after Amazon and other tech giants cut off the company for hosting calls for violence around the time of the Capitol riot.

Getting iced out by the tech giants turned Parler into a cause célèbre for conservatives who complained they were being censored, as well as a test case for the openness of the internet.

Parler relied on help from a Russian firm that once worked for the Russian government and a Seattle firm that once supported a neo-Nazi site.

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol subpoenaed Reddit, Twitter and the parent companies of Google and Facebook on Thursday after their "inadequate responses" to requests for information about what they did and didn't do in the lead-up to the deadly attack.

"It's disappointing that after months of engagement, we still do not have the documents and information necessary to answer those basic questions," committee Chair Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said in a statement. "The Select Committee is working to get answers for the American people and help ensure nothing like January 6th ever happens again. We cannot allow our important work to be delayed any further."

"Additionally, Meta has failed to provide critical internal and external analyses conducted by the company regarding misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation relating to the 2020 election, efforts to challenge or overturn the election, and the use of Meta by domestic violent extremists to affect the 2020 election," the letter said.

The U.S. has information that the Russian government is planning a "false-flag" operation to rationalize an invasion of Ukraine, a government official said Friday.

"Our information also indicates that Russian influence actors are already starting to fabricate Ukrainian provocations in state and social media to justify a Russian intervention and sow divisions in Ukraine," the official said. "For example, Russian officials and influence actors are emphasizing narratives about the deterioration of human rights in Ukraine and the increased militancy of Ukrainian leaders."

She added that an invasion by Russia now "may result in widespread human rights violations and war crimes should diplomacy fail to meet their objectives."

A 57-year-old man with life-threatening heart disease has received a heart from a genetically modified pig, a groundbreaking procedure that offers hope to hundreds of thousands of patients with failing organs.

“This is a watershed event,” said Dr. David Klassen, the chief medical officer of the United Network for Organ Sharing and a transplant physician. “Doors are starting to open that will lead, I believe, to major changes in how we treat organ failure.”

It creates the pulse, it creates the pressure, it is his heart,