THE ATLANTIC – Technology | Internet & Technology

To celebrate the start of a nationwide ban on social media for kids under the age of 16, the Australian government lit the Sydney Harbour Bridge with the slogan Let Them Be Kids.As of December 10, younger teenagers in Australia can no longer make accounts on popular social-media sites, including Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, and Twitch. The minister for communications’ rule for the ban defines a social-media site as one that primarily exists to encourage interaction among users and allow them to post their own content. (By this definition, so far, Pinterest, the super-popular chat site Discord, and the online game Roblox, though they have social features, are not included.) Social-media companies are required to make “reasonable” efforts to keep people under 16 off of their apps, and they face hefty financial penalties for noncompliance.The government’s argument for the ban has been clear: Getting kids off of social media will… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

The home-vacuum robot began, like most things, with war. In August 1990, the same month and year Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, three MIT roboticists incorporated the company that would eventually become iRobot, the maker of the Roomba.In its first decade, iRobot began to assemble a small-droid A-team for the theater of combat. The Ariel defused mines; the PackBot handled bomb disposal. (Later they would be joined by the Warrior, which breached obstacles; the camera-encrusted SUGV, which handled recon; and the palm-size FirstLook, which could be thrown through a window to investigate hazardous materials.) These machines weren’t weapons, but they facilitated weaponry’s consequences. At the turn of the millennium, iRobots might be seen on cable news kicking up Iraqi dust, investigating suspicious domestic packages, and probing the ruins of the World Trade Center.From their armature, iRobot built Roomba in 2002—a domesticated robot that surveilled, detected, and removed materials from wood floors… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

In a small room in San Diego last week, a man in a black leather jacket explained to me how to save the world from destruction by AI. Max Tegmark, a notable figure in the AI-safety movement, believes that “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI, could precipitate the end of human life. I was in town for NeurIPS, one of the largest AI-research conferences, and Tegmark had invited me, along with five other journalists, to a briefing on an AI-safety index that he would release the next day. No company scored better than a C+.The threat of technological superintelligence is the stuff of science fiction, yet it has become a topic of serious discussion in the past few years. Despite the lack of clear definition—even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has called AGI a “weakly defined term”—the idea that powerful AI contains an inherent threat to humanity has gained acceptance among respected… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Before each episode of America First With Nicholas J. Fuentes begins, a surreal mix of images and video clips runs, like a screen saver, for an unpredictable and seemingly eternal amount of time. Gentle plains of swaying grass, trickling streams, and the show’s logo flash across the screen. EDM kicks in. Psychedelic depictions of Christian imagery, including Jesus’s crucifixion, come and go. So do snippets of Fuentes talking about, among other things, borders, drag queens, and his faith. “We want this century to be the most Christian century in the history of planet Earth,” he says.I’ve become intimately familiar with these clips. Recently, I spent five days as a regular Fuentes viewer. Across five episodes of the nightly broadcast, I watched the 27-year-old white-supremacist influencer speak into a microphone for just shy of 12 hours total. The show is scheduled to air live on Rumble at 9 p.m. central time,… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

OpenAI turned 10 yesterday, and President Donald Trump incidentally gave the company a very special birthday gift: a sweeping executive order aiming to dismantle and preempt many state-level regulations of artificial intelligence. “There’s only going to be one winner here, and it’s probably going to be the U.S. or China,” Trump said in a press conference announcing the order. And for the United States to win, “we have to be unified. China is unified.”Almost all of the AI industry’s biggest players have been pushing for this move. OpenAI has been asking all year for the Trump administration to preempt state-level AI regulations, which the company believes would be burdensome in various ways; Microsoft, Google, Meta, Nvidia, and the major venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz have made similar requests. These firms and Trump have the same argument: Having to comply with dozens or hundreds of state regulations would be onerous, slowing the… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.