#self-driving cars algorithm

[r0semultiverse]

I refuse to hop in a Zoox car in my entire life if I can avoid it. I refuse to hop into any self-driving robo taxi (or robotaxi) that uses AI to keep it’s passengers “safe.” If this is actually a service they are legally allowed to provide publicly, there’s about to be a whole bunch of new laws made in hopefully very little time! Now you know me, obviously fuck the law, many laws are unjust, but sometimes we need some regulations to keep up with the shit that rich Silicon Valley tech bros “put out” while claiming it’s allegedly their own work. These rich bastards are dangerous! Now I’ll pass along the questions that my partner & I jokingly pondered. If something happens that the AI & detection systems doesn’t know how to handle, will us as the passengers be held legally responsible say if a child gets punted into the air by the self driving car & we can’t do anything to stop it? What if we’re asleep assuming the car is safe & it runs over a legally endangered animal? What if we’re on our phones & these self-driving robot cars cleave someone in half? What if it crashes into someone’s private property? Are we held responsible in any of these cases or is the big rich guy’s company? If it’s anything like Tesla, you should get your kids or pets out of the road when you see a Zoox car coming, it could allegedly cause some mortalities. Two more things. What’s stopping someone from hijacking, hacking, or planting a virus on these self-driving taxi services? What if one of them gets hijacked to take someone to a human trafficker meetup spot? Will the company be held responsible at all? The gifs below pretty much summarizes my feelings.

[firespirited]

the kill v maim car

Does Tumblr know that Tesla is removing turn signal stalks and gear shifters from their cars as a “feature.”

They did it with the Model S and X earlier this year, and they’re about to refresh the Model 3 to do the same. Since the Model 3 and Y share about 75% of the same parts, it’s safe to assume it’ll get the same treatment very soon, too. Meaning, 100% of Tesla’s lineup is about to have zero stalks on the steering column.

You activate turn signals via CAPACITIVE touch buttons on the steering wheel, and you don’t shift the car at all. The car decides what gear it thinks you need using AI. You can override it’s “thinking” on the touch screen.

Headlights and windshield wipers are also screen-only now.

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

"hoverboard" and it's just a motorized skateboard. "evil AI supercomputer" and it's just algorithmic plagiarism. "self-driving car" and it's a fucking tesla

[earpskeeper]

Not tired, just done

word count - 3k

trigger warnings - very poor mental health, autistic burnout, self harm mention, suicide attempt - do not read if you will be triggered -prioritise your own mental health please-

summary - you are a young breakthrough star for both Arsenal and the Lionesses but nobody truly knows how far your demons go.

______________________________________________________________

The roar of the crowd was a symphony you had learned to conduct. Each cheer, each groan and each drumming beat of expectation. You used it, you channelled it and turned it into fuel that spurred you on in big games. At eighteen, you were already a force to be reckoned with, a standout academy player and rising star within the Arsenal women's first team and a breakthrough player in the Lionesses squad. 

But behind the fierce exterior, fancy footwork and ability to break down plays in seconds was a struggling teenager. For years you had built a mask, a personality that would see yourself protected from hurtful comments or judgemental looks. Your parents had been the first people to make her realise that the world is unkind to people who are perhaps different to the norm. After you were told to leave your childhood home after your diagnosis of autism and adhd. 

The exterior everybody else sees is a carefully constructed algorithm of observed behaviours, a constant calculation of what to say, how to react and ways to blend in. The only person who truly understood who you were, was the psychologist employed by Arsenal football club. Dr Greene was her name and she had known you for just over 3 years, when you first made the transition from academy to professional football. 

The routines were the anchors in your life. Everyday was meticulously planned; wake up at 06:00 and make a protein shake (same bottle every time) then go for a light jog - same route, past the park every time. Back home for breakfast using the same oat milk with cereal to then get in the car with your pre-packed training bag to drive to training. Park in the same spot and walk through the doors for exactly 08:00 to enjoy some quiet time before the rest of the team walk through the doors ready for training at exactly 09:30. 

The pressure of expectation, the relentless media scrutiny nitpicking every aspect of you apart. It was all becoming too overwhelming and lately the familiar comfort of your routine had begun to feel less like an anchor and more like a heavy weight. A weight that dragged you below the surface and drowned you. 

You weren't quite sure when you had actually started to spiral. The self harm, a dark secret you have battled since your early teens had started to resurface. What had started out as pinches to your arms and thighs had turned into cuts. Strategically placed so as to not arouse suspicion. And your teammates were none the wiser. 

You couldn’t really blame them you supposed. Afterall, you had dedicated your life to blending into the background, to being a figment of the crowd and you were good at it. You gave the odd smile at your teammates' jokes and spoke when you were spoken too. But you never started a conversation yourself unless it was about football tactics or strategies. 

However there was one teammate who managed to see more than the others.

Beth had been there learning how to coach in the academy when you were still playing there. She was the one who brought your name up with Jonas and set the ball rolling for you to come up into the first team. She saw the talent in you and knew you were gonna go far. 

The beginning of the end started on a regular monday. You had woken up with the usual weight crushing your chest but for some reason you couldn’t get out of bed. 

You reached for your phone and invented a fake illness to buy yourself a few days with your manager. But that was it, no other messages to any of your teammates. You didn’t really feel the need to, which is why you were shocked when you received a message from Beth asking how you were. 

You were a little confused, but nevertheless you replied. Brief but concise, saying you just needed some time to rest and get better, which seemed to settle Beth’s mind a bit. 

She was the one teammate who was overly concerned when you suddenly broke your routine. You hadn’t a day off for the first time since coming up into the senior team and maybe since playing in the academy (but Beth couldn’t be absolutely certain about that). What made Beth even more worried was the lack of messages from you. Knowing you were the type of person who would stress about being late and missing the first five minutes of practice. 

“She’s probably just come down with a cold or something. You are being way too dramatic” Lia joked. After noticing Beth staring at her phone whilst chewing her nails.

“Yeah or she is hungover and being sneaky about it! She is 18 afterall.” Kyra rebutted back trying to put Beth’s mind at ease.

It wasn't until Dr Greene came looking for you after you had missed your weekly session on Thursday morning. It was something so out of character for you that it had Dr Greene extremely worried for your wellbeing. Especially when she found out you had been missing from training due to ‘potentially eating something gone off’ according to the message Jonas received.  

So worried that she headed to the gym whilst the rest of the team was in there stretching and asked for a word. It was as if by some good luck that on her way there she found Leah, Beth and Kim walking down the corridor. 

Dr Greene, bound by confidentiality, couldn't reveal much but the tremor in her voice spoke volumes. “I think someone should check on her… Just in case.”

Panic instantly surged through Beth, knowing she should have trusted her gut feeling and when Leah was being given her address by Dr Greene, Beth was already halfway to Kim’s car, running as if her life depended on it, or yours.

Pulling up to your house was weird. It made Leah, Beth and Kim realise that they had never actually been there. You had never invited the team around for bonding nights nor just a quiet dinner. 

Beth was the first one out of the door and the first one to reach your front door. Hammering her fists on it as if to open it. Kim and Leah soon followed and Kim soon got to work searching for a spare key. 

Leah was the first to shove Beth out of the way and start kicking the door down. On any other day it may have been seen as dramatic but the therapists words were on repeat in all of their heads, and within 3 hard kicks your front door was off its hinges. 

Your house was quiet, eerily quiet as the three players made their way through your living room. Your living room curtains were drawn and everything was meticulously tidied away, likened to a showroom. Your name was shouted out by all three women as they split up to cover ground quickly. It was Kim who found your letter. The beautifully tragic letter that was sure to break the heart of anyone who read it. But what stunned Kim the most is the way you had addressed it. There was no name, nobody you wanted it to go to, just written on the front on the envelope was ‘To whomever it concerns’. 

That put the fear of god into Kim as she screamed for Leah and Beth to join her. 

They found you in the bathroom, eyes vacant, skin pale and an empty bottle of pills on the side to confirm their worst fears. Leah was the first person to run to you as Kim rang the ambulance. Meanwhile Beth was stood, frozen in shock.  

The ambulance arrived quickly, sirens shattering the quiet atmosphere of your suburban neighbourhood and it was quickly confirmed that it was too late. Too late for any hopes of saving you. You were gone. 

The news spread like wildfire through the team and staff first. Nobody was left unscathed by the news of your death and left the team in particularly grieving in different ways. 

Leah, for example, used self reflection a lot and sometimes after training she would sit and stare at your old spot in the changing room, particularly at the peg where your football kit used to hang. She would think about the person you would’ve grown up to be, the footballing accolades you would’ve achieved. 

Kim became a mother of sorts, helping everyone else out and organising rotas for everyone to have multiple sessions a week with a therapist. She organised for there to be a memorial garden for you at the training ground. A quiet place of reflection staff and players alike could go to, to sit, remember and talk about you. 

Beth was more willing to bury her head in the sand and pretend everything was fine. Like you weren’t dead, like you were just on holiday and coming back soon. She kept everything you had left at the training centre in the place you left it. Down to your favourite water bottle. 

It hit the newspapers and social media next, and soon posts of sorrow were made online. The outpouring of love, the memorial messages and the candlelit vigils outside the Emirates. 

The interviews with your former coaches, tear-streaked fans in the stands, the silence held before kickoff and black armbands at the next match all held the same message. It was just too late. 

The funeral was a sorrowful affair. The streets were lined with faithful football supporters and fans of yours. 

Afterall, the news of your death had travelled far and fast. It had made front pages across the UK and appeared in foreign headlines as well. “England’s Star Girl Dies at 18,” read one tabloid. “Arsenal Prodigy Found Dead in Tragic Circumstances,” another. Journalists scrambled to piece together who she was, to trace the arc of your career, and speculate on the causes behind the tragedy. Everyone wanted a piece of the story — not because they knew you, but because it sold.

There were some young girls clutched footballs and photos, their wide eyes betraying confusion, as if trying to make sense of the fact that you were no more. As the team pulled up to the church where your service was being held, Beth couldn’t help but admire just how many people had come out to pay their respects. But the thing that caught her eye the most was the fact that there were several people clinging football shirts in one hand and a permanent marker in the other as if to demand a signature like they were at a football match.

For a week or two, you were the talk of the town. You were everywhere, 

Social media was flooded with tributes: edits of your goals and special moments from both club and country, photos of you celebrating in red and white, quotes pulled from post-match interviews and promotional campaigns. Hashtags trended. Influencers posted about mental health. The club released a carefully-worded statement, followed by a sombre montage that aired before kickoff at the next match. There was a minute’s silence. A black armband. A tweet from the FA.

But after a few weeks of apparent mourning online, things had gone back to normal. The posts dried up. The headlines turned to new transfers, league standings, the next rising star. Your name began to fade from the trending list, pushed down by the algorithm’s ever-churning hunger for fresh content. The digital mourning soon became archived, another “memory” in people’s feeds.

But for those who knew you personally, nothing had returned to normal. And in truth, it probably never would. 

Not for Dr Greene, who couldn’t stop replaying every session, every sign she might have missed.

Not for Kim, who had read the letter more times than she could count, searching for something she could have done differently.

Not for Leah who still couldn’t drive past your street without feeling sick.

Not for Beth, who believed deep down she truly could have saved you. 

And not for the empty chair in the dressing room. The peg that remained untouched. The silence that followed every mention of your name.

In the days following the funeral, the team returned to training, as beyond your death the football season was still continuing, but something fundamental had shifted. The energy was fractured. Conversations were shorter, silences heavier, and your absence felt like a gaping wound no one could stitch shut.

Although Kim, bless her heart, would try. She took it upon herself to become the glue of the team. She organised group check-ins on Wednesdays — nothing mandatory, just space. A quiet room in the training centre with tea, a selection of biscuits and a stack of blank cards where players could write memories or just sit in silence. Some days it was full. Other times, it was just her.

As well as that, she also arranged for the club psychologist to offer more one-on-one sessions, and created rotas for the players to sign up.  She sent check-in texts. She stayed late to talk, to listen, to hold space. If someone cried during a drill, she didn’t flinch. If someone snapped during a meeting, she absorbed it, as if to stop the grief from spreading.

Beth, however, was the first to unravel.

At first, it was subtle, she stopped staying behind to joke in the changing room, and stopped replying in the group chat. Then came the silence. Cold, echoing silence when her teammates tried to check in. She couldn’t bring herself to look any of them in the eye. Because every time she did, all she could hear was that moment in the locker room — “She’s probably just come down with a cold or something. You’re being dramatic.”

The words haunted her. They followed her around like a persistent shadow.

The argument happened in the carpark after training, breaking through the quiet that usually followed after a session full of silent drills and strained conversations. Beth was already halfway to her car, keys clenched in her fist, jaw tight, when Leah called out.

“Beth, wait—can we talk?”

Beth stopped walking but didn’t turn around. “What’s there to talk about?”

“I just…” Leah took a few steps closer, her voice soft but urgent. “I want to be here for you.”

Beth let out a bitter laugh and finally turned. “Now you do?”

Leah flinched. “Beth…”

“No,” Beth cut her off, her voice rising. “You don’t get to be here now like that fixes anything. You don’t get to act like this is something we’re all getting through together. Because it’s not. She’s gone. And you, you, talked me out of checking on her when it could have made a difference.”

Leah’s eyes widened, but Beth kept going, her voice trembling with fury and guilt.

“I knew something was wrong. I felt it. She never missed training. Never took a day off. I told you something didn’t feel right, and you made me feel like I was being overbearing. Like I was just paranoid.”

“Beth…” Leah’s voice cracked.

“No,” Beth snapped. “I should’ve gone to her house the first day she called in sick. I should’ve trusted my gut. But I listened to you. To all of you. And now she’s dead.”

Leah stepped forward, desperate. “You think I don’t blame myself too? You think I don’t go over every conversation I ever had with her, every moment I brushed something off, laughed at the wrong time, stayed silent when I should’ve asked more?”

Beth’s expression didn’t soften. “You didn’t know her like I did.”

“I know I didn’t,” Leah said, her voice almost a whisper. “I didn’t see her the way you did. But I cared. God, Beth, I cared so much, and I didn’t show it in the right way. I know that. But don’t push me away because I made a mistake. We all did.”

Beth shook her head, eyes full of grief and rage. “It wasn’t just a mistake, Leah. It was her life. You all acted like I was being too intense, like I was smothering her. And now you want to sit with me in grief, like this is something we all share?”

She stepped back. “You don’t deserve to grieve for her the way I do.”

Leah froze. The words landed like a slap. Her throat tightened, but she didn’t walk away. She refused to leave another of her teammates and friends alone in their pain.

“Just let me be here,” Leah said, her voice hoarse. “Please. I wasn’t there for her. And I will regret that for the rest of my life. Don’t let me make the same mistake again with you.”

Beth’s eyes flickered. She wanted to scream again, to throw the guilt back in Leah’s face — but her chest just hurt. Everything just hurts.

“She died Le, she fucking died alone thinking nobody cared about her.” Beth managed to whisper out.

She didn’t say anything else. She just turned, opened her car door, and got in, and Leah stood there in the fading light. Staring at the empty space where your car used to be.

And for the first time in days, she let herself cry.

______________________________________________________________

Hope you guys enjoyed it!

sorry for the sudden hiatus, I just had a lot of stuff going on in my life but I am hoping to be back now and taking requests.

[saffusthings]

second chances

mob boss! lando norris x reader

part seventeen: dream a little dream of me

word count: 1.6k

warnings: tooth-rotting fluff

sixteen | seventeen | eighteen

The second date should’ve felt more awkward. It didn’t.

Alex had picked a science museum of all places—not exactly romantic on paper, but the look on his face when he pointed out the replica Mars rover was too earnest to judge. He had this habit where his whole face would light up like a lightbulb the moment before he got excited about something, and Y/N had already learned to clock it like a warning siren.

“So, technically,” he was saying, hands jammed in his jacket pockets as they strolled past a massive display on deep-sea robotics, “the algorithms used for this submersible’s sensor mapping were adapted from AI software developed for self-driving cars.”

“Technically,” she echoed, teasing, “you should probably just work here.”

He looked sideways at her with a crooked grin. “I applied when I was sixteen. They didn’t take me.”

“They’re clearly still recovering from that mistake.”

He tried to play it off cool, but she caught the slight flush of his ears.

She liked him more than she expected to. Not in the way you decide to like someone—more like how you step outside one day and realize the air smells like rain and suddenly, you’re soft and open and all the windows are down. He was like that: unexpected and quiet and warm around the edges.

They made their way through the rest of the exhibits in no particular order, weaving between dwindling crowds of families and groups of students on field trips, neither of them in a hurry. He let her take her time at the forensic anthropology section, where she ran her fingers along the raised edges of a reconstructed skull, and she let him lose himself in the physics wing, where he explained, with ridiculous enthusiasm, why the double pendulum was so cool. It was there that the nickname Professor Albon was born.

At some point, he took her hand. It wasn’t a big deal. He just did it naturally, without hesitation, like it had already been a habit, and for a moment, that simple touch made her feel warm all over.

They ended the night sitting cross-legged on the floor of the museum café, long after it closed, surrounded by vending machine snacks and a half-solved crossword puzzle she’d found in her bag. The overhead lights buzzed faintly, casting a dim glow over the abandoned chairs and tables, but neither of them seemed eager to move. They laughed about everything and nothing, the kind of laughing that came from being tired but happy, the kind that made her lean into his shoulder without thinking.

"Okay," Alex said, tapping the eraser end of his pencil against the page. "Eight-letter word for ‘illuminates or clarifies’?"

As she took a moment to think it over, Alex watched in his periphery as she counted off the letters of her word on her fingers. "’Explains’ fits," she mused, popping a purple skittle into her mouth.

"Hmm." He scribbled it in. "Not bad. Maybe I should keep you around."

"Yeah, yeah," she nudged his knee with hers, grinning. "You just like me for my crossword skills."

"Wrong. I like you for your crossword skills and your terrible puns."

“My puns are great, thank you very much.” She rolled her eyes, but she was smiling.

He liked her brain. She liked how funny he was. They made a good pair—two academically overworked people who laughed at obscure engineering memes and played footsie under café tables without meaning to. When they said goodbye that night, he kissed her like he was trying not to smile through it. Like maybe this could really be something.

It felt easy.

And in the days that followed, it stayed easy. He texted her every night.

alex: Made the Mars rover jealous. Can’t stop thinking about you.

Y/N: did you just say that unironically. because I might have to stop seeing you on principle.

alex: Too late, I’ve already added you to my will. You get the Lego Technic collection.

Y/N: wait nvm i’m back in

They made time. Even when they both shouldn’t have.

He’d bring her coffee before her class–something with cinnamon and oat milk in it. He’d scrawl dumb physics jokes on the lid just to make her roll her eyes. She started keeping his schedule in her head without meaning to. She knew which nights he had his advanced systems class and which ones he spent buried in the lab. He’d text her when his simulations crashed at 3AM. She’d send him memes about courtroom drama tropes in return.

He had an engineer’s sense of humor—dry, sneaky, often deeply specific. It took a while to catch on, but once she did, it felt like discovering hidden easter eggs in his sentences.

“You know,” he’d murmur as they lay back in the grass near campus, watching clouds roll over like they weren’t chilly out here in the autumn breeze, “you statistically reduce your lifespan by two minutes every time you eat instant ramen.”

“Cool. So I’ll be dying a noble, sodium-rich death then.”

He turned his head toward her, smiling with closed eyes. “Hmm, a martyr.”

“A hero.”

“Buried with your books and MSG packets.”

She shoved his shoulder. He let her.

On Thursdays, she’d sit outside his lab, cross-legged on the cold tile floor with flashcards in her lap, quizzing him on his presentation slides about failure analysis and impact resistance.

“Okay, explain to me like I’m five—what is a stress-strain curve and why should I care?”

“Because,” he’d say, crouching in front of her with a smirk, “it tells you how close something is to breaking.”

“And that’s relevant to your research…?”

He gave her a confused look, until it turned sheepish as he scratched the back of his neck. “I’m… not entirely sure about that bit, actually.”

She started looking forward to the moments in between—the walks across campus, the shared bag of chips while sitting on the hood of her car, the ridiculous voice memos he sent when he was overtired and delirious.

They kissed in stairwells and library corners and once,perhaps ill-advisedly, on a park bench in the middle of a thunderstorm. The rain had soaked through their clothes, cold and unrelenting, but he had just looked at her and said, "I think we should be stupid about this," right before he leaned in. It was impulsive and dramatic and made her laugh until she had to cover her mouth, their faces inches apart. Her hair was soaked, his glasses fogged up, and they almost dropped his backpack in a puddle, but the moment stuck—sharp and golden and untouchable.

They talked about future dates like there’d be dozens of them—bookstores they wanted to browse together, a tiny Thai place he swore by, a stargazing night he promised would be “scientifically optimized for romance” depending on the cloud cover. She rolled her eyes at that one, but her heart still fluttered.

They were still in the sweet spot—the space between maybe and more, where everything felt bright and possible. 

It wasn’t perfect – but it was promising.

The third date was dinner—some hole-in-the-wall Thai place with flickering neon signage and laminated menus stained with old curry thumbprints. He’d gotten lost on the way and sent a flurry of frantic texts.

alex :) : I passed the restaurant. Twice. There’s a cat staring at me through a laundromat window. I think it’s judging me.

Y/N: be strong. you can beat the cat.

alex :) : Negative, Sargeant. It’s very confident.

He’d arrived breathless, slightly damp from a drizzle, and holding a single packet of Skittles “for your efforts,” he’d said solemnly. She called him an idiot. He looked delighted.

That night, they talked about things that didn’t matter—TV shows neither of them had finished, foods they pretended to like for the aesthetic, the sheer horror of Alex’s undergraduate group project from hell (“We had a guy who thought duct tape was a structural solution”). 

And then, slowly, they talked about the things that did matter.

Like how she used to want to be a journalist when she was little, because she thought it meant you got to ask as many questions as you wanted and never had to apologize.

Or how he still wasn’t sure what kind of engineer he wanted to be—just that he wanted to make things that didn’t break when people needed them most.

“You know,” he said, nudging his glass in slow circles across the table, “you’re not what I expected.”

Y/N looked up. “Is that a good thing or, like, a 'you’re secretly a serial killer' kind of a thing?”

He smiled. “It’s a good thing. Really, really good.”

By the fourth week, they had a rhythm. It wasn’t just dates anymore—it was Hey, want to walk home together? and I saved you the last chocolate chip muffin, but only because I like you more than I like muffins. But barely.

It was him reaching for her hand without thinking, her resting her head against his shoulder on the bus when she was too tired to hold it up.

It was a shared Spotify playlist for when studying is ur 13th reason.

It was early Saturday morning sun filtering into her apartment while they quietly read their own books, his socked foot nudging hers on the side of the couch almost every ten minutes.

It was good.

But between the sleepy smiles and the shared muffins and the texts that kept getting longer instead of shorter, the truth was that they both had dreams. Big ones. All-consuming ones.

And no matter how much you wanted something—or someone—there were only so many hours in the day.

a/n: one of my more favorite chapters! an unfortunate lack of lando though :/ what did you think of it?

[probablyasocialecologist]

We don’t yet know exactly why a group of people very publicly graffitied, smashed, and torched a Waymo car in San Francisco. But we know enough to understand that this is an explosive milestone in the growing, if scattershot, revolt against big tech. We know that self-driving cars are wildly divisive, especially in cities where they’ve begun to share the streets with emergency responders, pedestrians and cyclists. Public confidence in the technology has actually been declining as they’ve rolled out, owing as much to general anxiety over driverless cars as to high-profile incidents like a GM Cruise robotaxi trapping, dragging, and critically injuring a pedestrian last fall. Just over a third of Americans say they’d ride in one. We also know that the pyrotechnic demolition can be seen as the most dramatic act yet in a series of escalations — self-driving cars have been vocally opposed by officials, protested, “coned,” attacked, and, now, set ablaze in a carnivalesque display of defiance. The Waymo torching did not take place in a vacuum. To that end, we know that trust in Silicon Valley in general is eroding, and anger towards the big tech companies — Waymo is owned by Alphabet, the parent company of Google — is percolating. Not just at self-driving cars, of course, but at generative AI companies that critics say hoover up copyrighted works to produce plagiarized output, at punishing, algorithmically mediated work regimes at the likes of Uber and Amazon, at the misinformation and toxic content pushed by Facebook and TikTok, and so on. It’s all of a piece. All of the above contributes to the spreading sense that big tech has an inordinate amount of control over the ordinary person’s life — to decide, for example, whether or not robo-SUVs will roam the streets of their communities — and that the average person has little to no meaningful recourse.

[balkanradfem]

I'm reading the 'Age of Surveillance Capitalism' book by Shoshana Zuboff, and it is haunting me, making me feel uncomfortable and making me want to move offline.

We've all been aware that google, facebook, and all other digital tech companies are taking our data and selling it to advertisers, but according to the book, that is not the end goal.

The book goes into the rise of google, and how it made itself better by constantly studying the searches people were inputting, and learning how to offer better information faster. Then, they were able to develop ways to target adverts, without even selling the data, but by making their own decisions of what adds should be targeted at what audience. But they kept collecting more and more data, and basically studying human behaviour the way scientists study animals, without their knowledge or consent. Then they bought youtube, precisely because youtube had such vast amounts of human behaviour that could be stored and studied.

But they're not only using that data to target adds at us. They've been collecting data in ways that feel unexpected and startling to me. And whenever they're challenged or confronted with it, they pretend it was a mistake, or unintentional, and it's scary how far they've been able to get away with it.

For example, during their street-view data collecting, the google car had been connecting to every wifi available and taking encrypted, personal data from households. When they got found out, they've explained it was not intentional, and a fault of a lone researcher who had gone rouge, and they evaded getting sued or being held accountable for it at all. Countries have created new laws and regulations and google kept evading it and in the end they claimed 'you know if you keep trying to regulate us, we'll just do things secretly'. Which is a wild thing to say and expect to get away with!

Another thing that struck me was that governments, which at first wanted to restrict data collection, later asked tech companies to monitor and prevent content connected to terrorism, and the companies didn't like the idea of being a tool of the government, so they claimed the terrorism data is being banned for 'being against their policy'. Which makes me believe they didn't want to remove that content at all, after all, they could have done it beforehand, they didn't feel any natural incentives to do so.

The entire story is filled with researchers who don't seem to experience the human population as other human beings. They don't believe we deserve privacy, or dignity, or any say in what is being collected or done to us. Hearing their quotes and how they describe the people they're researching shows clearly they consider us all stupid, and our desires for privacy, self-harming. They insist we'd be better off if we just accepted their authority and gave them any data they wanted without complaining or being upset it's being collected without our knowledge.

Even though companies claim at all times that the data is non-identifiable, the book explains just how data is handled and how easy it is to identify anyone whose private conversations are recorded; people say their names, their addresses, places they're going, friends they're meeting, they say names of their family members, their devices record their location and their habits, it is extremely easy to identify anyone whose information has been collected. It can be identified and sold to information agencies.

I believed when it was explained to me that most of the data collection was just for add targeting, and that it would be used only for advertisement purposes, but they're not only collecting data anymore, they're deciding what data is being fed to us, and recording our reactions, learning how they can affect and manipulate our behaviour. We know all algorithms feed us controversial, enraging and highly-emotional content in order to drive engagement, but it's more than that. They've discovered how they can influence more or less people to vote. The mere idea of that makes me go cold, but they talk about it like it's just another thing they can do, so why not? Companies who have experimented and learned so much about influencing human behaviour give themselves the right to influence it as they see fit, because why wouldn't they? Since they have the power to do it, and all lawsuits and regulations can't stop them, why wouldn't they make a game out of it?

I can't imagine how many experiments they did before feeling so confident and blase about this and casually influencing the elections, again, seemingly just for the sake of an experiment.

The book compares this type of behaviour manipulation to totalitarianism and surveillance state, and it shows how the population is slowly losing parts of their freedoms without realizing it is even happening. Human behaviour has changed due to online influence, and it keeps changing rapidly, with every new popular website that is influencing human behaviour. They've learned that humans are influenced mostly by behaviour of other humans, and they can decide what kind of content or influence to send our way to get desired results.

I love how the author of the book talks about humanity. She uses the term 'human future', as something we all have the right to, as opposed to future controlled by companies and influences. She describes how regular people were affected by the data collected against their will, and how they fought for their 'right to be forgotten', when google kept displaying their past struggles, damaging their dignity. She also explains the questions people should ask about how society is led: First question is, who knows? Second question, who decides? Third question, who decides who decides? She goes in detail about how the answers are held away from us, and what it does to us. She also touches very deeply on the idea of human freedom!

I recommend this book, even though it will make you feel far less secure and carefree to be online, and using anything google, facebook, twitter or any of their owned services. They are not free, and it's also incorrect to say that we're the product of them, but we are the source of the raw materials they collect in order to gain results.

[seat-safety-switch]

Usually, when someone tells you that you can make money from home, it's a scam. The bourgeois monsters who control our society demand that we attend to a physical place of work. Even when you're "working from home," it usually only serves to make your house feel like an office. That's no fun at all, so I decided to liberate the human spirit by developing TheftBot.

TheftBot is, simply put, a fully sentient robot for stealing automatic teller machines (ATMs) from nearby convenience stores. Those ATMs, in case you are unfamiliar, are stuffed with cash – the bank's cash – and that money can be spent on goods and services, like semi-slick racing tires or turbochargers.

He's built on an old Kubota forklift frame, with a nitrous-stuffed 500-cubic-inch Cadillac V8 loosely bolted onto it. That provides tons of power to outrun the police and even the most eager private security forces. Importantly, he's fully remote-controllable, which means I both don't have to be in the cabin, and have plausible deniability if his "self-driving algorithm" goes a little kooky-koo and slams through the front of a QuickStop, emerging seconds later with a Diebold-Nixdorf containing approximately nine hundred dollars on average. The autonomous car laws are very loose in my neck of the woods, you see.

Sure, there's a lot of downsides to this kind of hustle culture. The biggest part is all the guilt: ATM theft used to be a heroic, working-class job that paid well. Now I've automated it, a bourgeois action that makes me no different from the banks. I think that buying a few more turbochargers could make me feel a little better about it, though.

[mariacallous]

One hallmark of our current moment is that when an event happens, there is little collective agreement on even basic facts. This, despite there being more documentary evidence than ever before in history: Information is abundant, yet consensus is elusive.

The ICE protests in Los Angeles over the past week offer an especially relevant example of this phenomenon. What has transpired is fairly clear: A series of ICE raids and arrests late last week prompted protests in select areas of the city, namely downtown, near a federal building where ICE has offices, and around City Hall and the Metropolitan Detention Center. There have been other protests south of there, around a Home Depot in Paramount, where Border Patrol agents gathered last week. The majority of these protests have been civil (“I mostly saw clergy sit-ins and Tejano bands,” The American Prospect’s David Dayen wrote). There has been some looting and property destruction. “One group of vandals summoned several Waymo self-driving cars to the street next to the plaza where the city was founded and set them ablaze,” my colleague Nick Miroff, who has been present at the demonstrations, wrote.

As is common in modern protests, there has also been ample viral footage from news organizations showing militarized police responding aggressively in encounters, sometimes without provocation. In one well-circulated clip, an officer in riot gear fires a nonlethal round directly at an Australian television correspondent carrying a microphone while on air; another piece of footage shot from above shows a police officer on horseback trampling a protester on the ground.

All of these dynamics are familiar in the post-Ferguson era of protest. What you are witnessing is a news event distributed and consumed through a constellation of different still images and video clips, all filmed from different perspectives and presented by individuals and organizations with different agendas. It is a buffet of violence, celebration, confusion, and sensationalism. Consumed in aggregate, it might provide an accurate representation of the proceedings: a tense, potentially dangerous, but still contained response by a community to a brutal federal immigration crackdown.

Unfortunately, very few people consume media this way. And so the protests follow the choose-your-own-adventure quality of a fractured media ecosystem, where, depending on the prism one chooses, what’s happening in L.A. varies considerably.

Anyone is capable of cherry-picking media to suit their arguments, of course, and social media has always narrowed the aperture of news events to fit particular viewpoints. Regardless of ideology, dramatic perspectives succeed on platforms. It is possible that one’s impression of the protests would be incorrectly skewed if informed only by Bluesky commentators, MSNBC guests, or self-proclaimed rational centrists. The right, for example, has mocked the idea of “mostly peaceful protests” as ludicrous when juxtaposed with video of what they see as evidence to the contrary. It’s likely that my grasp of the events and their politics is shaped by decades of algorithmic social-media consumption.

Yet the situation in L.A. only further clarifies the asymmetries among media ecosystems. This is not an even playing field. The right-wing media complex has a disproportionate presence and is populated by extreme personalities who have no problem embracing nonsense AI imagery and flagrantly untrue reporting that fits their agenda. Here you will find a loosely affiliated network of streamers, influencers, alternative social networks, extremely online vice presidents, and Fox News personalities who appear invested in portraying the L.A. protests as a full-blown insurrection. To follow these reports is to believe that people are not protesting but rioting throughout the city. In this alternate reality, the whole of Los Angeles is a bona fide war zone. (It is not, despite President Donald Trump’s wildly disproportionate response, which includes deploying hundreds of U.S. Marines to the area and federalizing thousands of National Guard members.)

I spent the better part of the week drinking from this particular firehose, reading X and Truth Social posts and watching videos from Rumble. On these platforms, the protests are less a news event than a justification for the authoritarian use of force. Nearly every image or video contains selectively chosen visuals of burning cars or Mexican flags unfurling in a smog of tear gas, and they’re cycled on repeat to create a sense of overwhelming chaos. They have titles such as “CIVIL WAR ALERT” and “DEMOCRATS STOKE WW3!” All of this incendiary messaging is assisted by generative-AI images of postapocalyptic, smoldering city streets—pure propaganda to fill the gap between reality and the world as the MAGA faithful wish to see it.

I’ve written before about how the internet has obliterated the monoculture, empowering individuals to cocoon themselves in alternate realities despite confounding evidence—it is a machine that justifies any belief. This is not a new phenomenon, but the problem is getting worse as media ecosystems mature and adjust to new technologies. On Tuesday, one of the top results for one user’s TikTok search for Los Angeles curfew was an AI-generated video rotating through slop images of a looted city under lockdown. Even to the untrained eye, the images were easily identifiable as AI-rendered (the word curfew came out looking like ciuftew). Still, it’s not clear that this matters to the people consuming and sharing the bogus footage. Even though such reality-fracturing has become a load-bearing feature of our information environment, the result is disturbing: Some percentage of Americans believes that one of the country’s largest cities is now a hellscape, when, in fact, almost all residents of Los Angeles are going about their normal lives.

On platforms such as Bluesky and Instagram, I’ve seen L.A. residents sharing pictures of themselves going about their day-to-day lives—taking out the trash, going to the farmers’ market—and lots of pictures of the city’s unmistakable skyline against the backdrop of a beautiful summer day. These are earnest efforts to show the city as it is (fine)—an attempt to wrest control of a narrative, albeit one that is actually based in truth. Yet it’s hard to imagine any of this reaching the eyes of the people who participate in the opposing ecosystem, and even if it did, it’s unclear whether it would matter. As I documented in October, after Hurricanes Helene and Milton destroyed parts of the United States, AI-generated images were used by Trump supporters “to convey whatever partisan message suits the moment, regardless of truth.”

In the cinematic universe of right-wing media, the L.A. ICE protests are a sequel of sorts to the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020. It doesn’t matter that the size and scope have been different in Los Angeles (at present, the L.A. protests do not, for instance, resemble the 100-plus nights of demonstrations and clashes between protesters and police that took place in Portland, Oregon, in 2020): Influencers and broadcasters on the right have seized on the association with those previous protests, insinuating that this next installment, like all sequels, will be a bigger and bolder spectacle. Politicians are running the sequel playbook—Senator Tom Cotton, who wrote a rightly criticized New York Times op-ed in 2020 urging Trump to “Send in the Troops” to quash BLM demonstrations, wrote another op-ed, this time for The Wall Street Journal, with the headline “Send in the Troops, for Real.” (For transparency’s sake, I should note that I worked for the Times opinion desk when the Cotton op-ed was published and publicly objected to it at the time.)

There is a sequel vibe to so much of the Trump administration’s second term. The administration’s policies are more extreme, and there’s a brazenness to the whole affair—nobody’s even trying to justify the plot (or, in this case, cover up the corruption and dubious legality of the government’s deportation regime). All of us, Trump supporters very much included, are treated as a captive audience, forced to watch whether we like it or not.

This feeling has naturally trickled down to much of the discourse and news around Trump’s second presidency, which feels (and generally is) direr, angrier, more intractable. The distortions are everywhere: People mainlining fascistic AI slop are occupying an alternate reality. But even those of us who understand the complexity of the protests are forced to live in our own bifurcated reality, one where, even as the internet shows us fresh horrors every hour, life outside these feeds may be continuing in ways that feel familiar and boring. We are living through the regime of a budding authoritarian—the emergency is here, now—yet our cities are not yet on fire in the way that many shock jocks say they are.

The only way out of this mess begins with resisting the distortions. In many cases, the first step is to state things plainly. Los Angeles is not a lawless, postapocalyptic war zone. The right to protest is constitutionally protected, and protests have the potential to become violent—consider how Trump is attempting to use the force of the state to silence dissent against his administration. There are thousands more peaceful demonstrations scheduled nationally this weekend. The tools that promised to empower us, connect us, and bring us closer to the truth are instead doing the opposite. A meaningful percentage of American citizens appears to have dissociated from reality. In fact, many of them seem to like it that way.

[tangentiallly]

One way to spot patterns is to show AI models millions of labelled examples. This method requires humans to painstakingly label all this data so they can be analysed by computers. Without them, the algorithms that underpin self-driving cars or facial recognition remain blind. They cannot learn patterns.

The algorithms built in this way now augment or stand in for human judgement in areas as varied as medicine, criminal justice, social welfare and mortgage and loan decisions. Generative AI, the latest iteration of AI software, can create words, code and images. This has transformed them into creative assistants, helping teachers, financial advisers, lawyers, artists and programmers to co-create original works.

To build AI, Silicon Valley’s most illustrious companies are fighting over the limited talent of computer scientists in their backyard, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to a newly minted Ph.D. But to train and deploy them using real-world data, these same companies have turned to the likes of Sama, and their veritable armies of low-wage workers with basic digital literacy, but no stable employment.

Sama isn’t the only service of its kind globally. Start-ups such as Scale AI, Appen, Hive Micro, iMerit and Mighty AI (now owned by Uber), and more traditional IT companies such as Accenture and Wipro are all part of this growing industry estimated to be worth $17bn by 2030.

Because of the sheer volume of data that AI companies need to be labelled, most start-ups outsource their services to lower-income countries where hundreds of workers like Ian and Benja are paid to sift and interpret data that trains AI systems.

Displaced Syrian doctors train medical software that helps diagnose prostate cancer in Britain. Out-of-work college graduates in recession-hit Venezuela categorize fashion products for e-commerce sites. Impoverished women in Kolkata’s Metiabruz, a poor Muslim neighbourhood, have labelled voice clips for Amazon’s Echo speaker. Their work couches a badly kept secret about so-called artificial intelligence systems – that the technology does not ‘learn’ independently, and it needs humans, millions of them, to power it. Data workers are the invaluable human links in the global AI supply chain.

This workforce is largely fragmented, and made up of the most precarious workers in society: disadvantaged youth, women with dependents, minorities, migrants and refugees. The stated goal of AI companies and the outsourcers they work with is to include these communities in the digital revolution, giving them stable and ethical employment despite their precarity. Yet, as I came to discover, data workers are as precarious as factory workers, their labour is largely ghost work and they remain an undervalued bedrock of the AI industry.

As this community emerges from the shadows, journalists and academics are beginning to understand how these globally dispersed workers impact our daily lives: the wildly popular content generated by AI chatbots like ChatGPT, the content we scroll through on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, the items we browse when shopping online, the vehicles we drive, even the food we eat, it’s all sorted, labelled and categorized with the help of data workers.

Milagros Miceli, an Argentinian researcher based in Berlin, studies the ethnography of data work in the developing world. When she started out, she couldn’t find anything about the lived experience of AI labourers, nothing about who these people actually were and what their work was like. ‘As a sociologist, I felt it was a big gap,’ she says. ‘There are few who are putting a face to those people: who are they and how do they do their jobs, what do their work practices involve? And what are the labour conditions that they are subject to?’

Miceli was right – it was hard to find a company that would allow me access to its data labourers with minimal interference. Secrecy is often written into their contracts in the form of non-disclosure agreements that forbid direct contact with clients and public disclosure of clients’ names. This is usually imposed by clients rather than the outsourcing companies. For instance, Facebook-owner Meta, who is a client of Sama, asks workers to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Often, workers may not even know who their client is, what type of algorithmic system they are working on, or what their counterparts in other parts of the world are paid for the same job.

The arrangements of a company like Sama – low wages, secrecy, extraction of labour from vulnerable communities – is veered towards inequality. After all, this is ultimately affordable labour. Providing employment to minorities and slum youth may be empowering and uplifting to a point, but these workers are also comparatively inexpensive, with almost no relative bargaining power, leverage or resources to rebel.

Even the objective of data-labelling work felt extractive: it trains AI systems, which will eventually replace the very humans doing the training. But of the dozens of workers I spoke to over the course of two years, not one was aware of the implications of training their replacements, that they were being paid to hasten their own obsolescence.

— Madhumita Murgia, Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI

[mysteriousparableknowledge]

what is the use of AI?

Ai has gone from science fiction to the everyday reality. From voice assistants like Siri and Alexa to smart recommendations on Netflix and self-driving cars.

Artificial Intelligence has many aspects of our daily lives. For example, smartphones use AI to power voice assistants like Siri and facial recognition features that unlock your device effortlessly.

In healthcare, AI helps doctors by analyzing medical images and assisting in diagnosing diseases more quickly and accurately.

The finance sector relies on AI for detecting fraud and optimizing trading algorithms to make smarter investment decisions.

Transportation has seen advances like self-driving cars and AI-powered traffic prediction apps that help reduce congestion and suggest the fastest routes.

Even in entertainment, AI drives personalized recommendations on platforms like Netflix and Spotify, and controls adaptive non-player characters (NPCs) in video games to create more engaging experiences.

[tmarshconnors]

The Human Mind is Truly Remarkable

by Thomas Marsh-Connors Angry British Conservative Blog

We live in an age obsessed with machines artificial intelligence, robots, algorithms, and self-driving cars. And yet, every so often, something as simple as tossing your phone in the air reminds you: that nothing mankind has created comes close to the brilliance of the human brain.

Earlier today, while chatting with a mate on the phone, I found myself instinctively throwing my iPhone in the air and catching it. Over and over. Absent-mindedly. Without even thinking about it.

And then it hit me: How the hell is my brain doing this?

I wasn’t consciously focusing on catching the phone. I wasn’t calculating trajectory or distance. I wasn’t telling my fingers when to close or where to move. I was having a conversation and yet, somehow, another part of me was tracking a moving object in space, adjusting my hand’s position in real-time, compensating for motion, light, gravity, and muscle tension. All without conscious effort.

Let me tell you something: that’s not normal. At least, it shouldn't be. It’s not something we should take for granted. It’s miraculous.

A Symphony of Silent Genius

Your brain is a conductor and your body is the orchestra. Just to perform this simple task (tossing and catching a phone), dozens of brain regions coordinate perfectly:

The motor cortex activates your muscles.

The cerebellum controls timing, precision, and balance.

The visual cortex tracks the phone’s arc.

The dorsal stream predicts where the phone will land.

Proprioception (your sixth sense) tells you where your hand is in space.

Reflexes make tiny last-second adjustments.

And the best part? You don’t have to think about any of it.

You're running two separate but perfectly synchronized processes one verbal (talking to your friend) and one physical (catching your phone). And both are happening seamlessly. Your brain is splitting tasks, assigning them to different areas, prioritizing efficiently, and updating inputs constantly. That’s not just multitasking that’s a level of organic processing power no AI system has ever come close to.

We Are Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

As a Christian, this sort of thing only deepens my awe. You could spend your entire life studying neuroscience and still not touch the depths of how the mind works. The way the brain governs the body silently, precisely, and with effortless grace speaks of something far greater than random chance or chemical coincidence. It’s design, not chaos. Order, not noise.

And while Big Tech wants us all to marvel at the “latest breakthrough” in silicon intelligence, perhaps we ought to spend a bit more time being blown away by the carbon-based intelligence sitting between our ears.

Your mind is not just remarkable it’s sacred.

So next time you find yourself tossing your phone, catching a mug without spilling the tea, or typing a text while crossing the road without getting flattened just pause. Marvel. Respect the machinery you’ve been gifted.

Because the most powerful computer on earth… is you.

[spidereggs888]

Miguel’s new secretary ooh-la-la

(lol /j 💀)

Miguel O’Hara & y/n, any gender or non gender. Very casual writing style. TW Dark humor, dangerous situations, 18+. Y/n are sorta attracted to Miguel (why else would you be here?) but he doesn’t know you lol

This is a loooong read so make sure you have time or something. Also, there’s an illustration in the middle of the chapter! Enjoy

≋≋≋≋≋≋≋≋≋≋≋≋

MIGUEL & YOU

ACT 1 | ALGORITHMIC LOTTERY

It's the year 2110.

You are maneuvering through traffic in a sputtery fashion, the lifter problem in your engine getting so bad it almost sounds like you got rocks under the hood. The podcast is going on about alligators in Nueva York sewers.

“Couldn’t be more wrong,” you mumble, “there’s CROCODILES in the sewers, not alligators.”

You aren’t looking forward to this interview. How the heck did you manage an audition for office secretary to the CEO of Alchemax?!

“I don’t know,” you say aloud to your other self, “but if I get the job, Imma upgrade to a better ride than this heap of Maglev shit…”

But there’s other bitches who want this position. Two of them you are aware of: Syd and Brody. Syd is a real suck up who will say any damn thing to get the position. She out-groveled you and got the lead PR accounting job you wanted. Suck-up Syd is what you call her around your friends. Brody on the other hand is opposite; he thinks he can strong-arm his way into anything and he pretty much has. He’s kicked people down, screwed people over, and there’s a rumor he filed a sexual harassment charge on his friend Ashton just to get the promotion before Ashton could.

These two skanks are gonna be tricky, but that’s the least of why you loathe this whole thing. You also heard that Miguel O’Hara is a hard ass. When he came into power a few years ago, he immediately fired the former secretary for talking about his father in a positive light. Then he proceeded to chew and spit out people who ever had the misfortune of being in that job position.

“Or maybe they just cut their losses after raking in half a billion,” your friend Speshall guessed the last time you seen her, “they prolly couldn’t take the heat for that long so they waited until they were set for life then said something stupid on purpose to get him to let them go. What a retirement plan! To work for the sexiest man of the year then have him berate you on your way out!”

She was always like this.

Anyway, now your car is not being validated in the automated parking center.

“What the HELL?!”

“Sorry, your credit has been declined.”

“Oh fuck me-“

You fumble your lanyard of data sticks. You are looking for the green one, which has a small amount of credit you procured from test playing phone games. You lean out of your car window to bring the green stick drive near the wireless reader.

“Sorry, we cannot accept credit from online gambling. Please use another method of payment.”

“Oh fuck you!”

≋ ≋ ≋ ≋

Now you are walking. You had to park where they don’t give a shit about where your money is from. Alchemax is trying to create a good precedent by not accepting dirty money, but Alchemax, as far as you know, does dirtier stuff for pay. Why the hell is “gambling money” any different?!

Scowling so hard, you almost didn’t notice there’s some douchebag trying to walk close behind you. He probably saw the lanyard of data sticks around your neck, so you fluff your scarf around until they are covered.

“I don’t have any money, muh guy” you say in your heaviest Nueva York accent along with this generations lingo.

“Oh I’m not afta you. I was tryna tell ya there’s this otha weirdo following ya. I’m tryna group up here.”

You know better than to look back. That’s what this fucko wants you to do. He’s probably a flasher, so you walk into traffic.

“Hey that’s dangerous, yo!”

You don’t listen. Cars flying past is not as scary as going up to see the freakin CEO of Alchemax.

No cars hit you, so now you have to face reality. You walk into the Alchemax Business Bureau building (one of hundreds), and wave your ID at the receptionist in the lobby. The receptionist is preoccupied with a lady who has one hand on her hip and the other holding out a holo watch. It’s projecting a screen with a giant hourglass animation flipping over and over.

“I don’t know why it’s so hard to get a damn cup of coffee around here, I just don’t!”

“C’mon it’s not necessary to bring security here, ma’am.”

He remains standing behind his desk and grimaces at you. You really need to get him to validate your ID so you won’t be stopped by security, so you pull up your phone and say to the woman, “you want some coffee coupons for Dunkin Donuts?”

“What?”

You open your savings app and hastily air-swipe several coupons to her holo device like someone flicking bills at a stripper. She stops to look at them.

“A regular frap for half off? Oh woooow, how- will they really honor this?” She asks.

“Yeah! It’s good for two more days, so you may wanna hurry over to the kiosk at the west end.”

“Really?”

“They sell all brands of coffee, they’ll honor it.”

“Well, nevermind, then,” she says curtly to the receptionist as she turns her shoulder away, “Didn’t want hours-old coffee anyway.”

She turns on her fancy heel and trots away. You grin stupidly at the receptionist who rolls his eyes and snatches your ID card from you. He swipes it near his card reader then flicks it back without a word.

After a nod, you swiftly leave down the lobby to the elevator area. You round the corner and see an open elevator closing. It's the only one since the other two are under construction. You rush forward as fast as your legs will allow.

"Wait wait WAIT WAIT!"

The doors are closing and you see the face of Suck-up Syd with her smoky eyes and faux fur capelet. She smiles and does nothing as the doors close.

"Shocking typical," you grumble. But you know where the other elevator is. You take off to the other end of the building for the second set of elevators.

You make it onto the elevator with two other people, some white chick and an Indian dude. The lady sees your pass.

"Going for the secretary job?" She asks.

"Yeah."

“Me too. If I don’t get this, I’m going to jump from this building,” the lady jokes.

“If I get this, I WILL jump from this building,” you add.

“Either way, it's gonna be job security for the custodian department,” the Indian guy says. All three of you chuckle politely.

The elevator lets more people in. You check your phone. You are fucking late by 20 minutes, but so is the lady who wants this job or else. You assume it would have taken a while anyway, since there was about 15 people going in for this very same job. Could it be you?! Could you land this job?! What if your mom was wrong?! And what if O’Hara says yes? What if you are set for life?

The final floor of this elevator is reached. You wobble on your way out. The lady doesn’t move.

“Actually, I can’t do this. I’m going home.”

The elevator doors close and she goes back down. You hear a faint byeeeeeeeeeee as the elevator descends to lower levels. You pay no heed and follow the Indian man into the massive hall.

There’s already chaos. One guy is being escorted out of the lobby by his shirt collar, and he's spouting obscenities. Some lady had dropped all her paperwork and she’s too numb to pick it up again. Two ladies near her are sarcastically wishing each other luck, one of them is Suck-up Syd. She looks 10x more desperate today with her tight-fitting outfit and belt buckle the size of a plate. Her overly fake smile gives you no esteem or hope. You almost sit but realize there’s barf on the chair.

Okay, surely everyone is overreacting in here.

“Man I’m not scared at all. There’s a trick to facing down Alpha males,” says a guy who you didn’t ask.

“Ah, cool.” you say through a grin. It’s Brody. You don’t even have to see him to know he’s there with his overwhelming presence of snobbery.

“See, as a Sigma male,” he continues, leaning on the back of the barf chair to talk to you, “I don’t adhere to the Alpha’s orders. That’s how the pack survives! One guy is an outlier so like if the Alpha fails in his role as leader, the Sigma will show by example and the rest of the females and Betas will follow him-“

“BRODY!”

You and Brody see Ashton in the doorway you came from. Ashton beelines across the room with his briefcase raised high. He brings it down on Brody with a loud clunk and they grapple and exchange blows. You go ahead and sit down perfectly still.

"Oh my GOD!" Suck-up Syd muses. She only sees this as two less competitors. You wince as the men start yelling obscenities at each other in their struggle. The guards who took out the last guy come back in and see this happening and they both huff angrily.

"Next!"

"Ah, that's me!" Syd says, “you guys are welcome to leave, I probably got this in the bag.”

She gets up and thrusts her capelet onto the lobby assistant.

.˳˳.⋅ॱ˙˙ॱ⋅.˳ ˳.⋅ॱ˙˙ॱᐧ.˳˳.

Four hours pass. Brody and Ashton were escorted from the building, those bozos didn’t even get an interview, but it was funny watching Brody get dragged down to hell by a demon he wronged.

Suck-up Syd walked out in tears and a forced smile. You felt bad for making fun of her in the past. She’s just kinda desperate and a little pathetic. You assume groveling doesn't work on the boss.

Other people came and went swiftly. The cheerful Indian man from earlier left looking surprised at his failure. The lady who dropped all her crap earlier apparently already had an interview and was reeling from her bad luck. You understand their disappointment since being chosen for this position was like winning the lottery, except you don't know if you won or not.

“Next!”

Your stomach twists but you refuse to be like them. This is just a job. You’ll be answering phones, emails, and possibly even mailing some dry cleaning. No big fuckin deal.

You thank the lobby assistant but she ignores you and walks away. She is just doing her job. She looks very tired of everyone else’s shit and is probably glad it's over. You walk to the elevator where the second to last person is taking baby-steps, talking on his phone with someone nursing his wounded pride. That could be you in a minute.

I'm probably not gonna get it either, you think, but I'm going down with some dignity.

You work yourself up as you step into yet another elevator, this one glass paneled. You stare across Nueva York as you ascend, contemplating your future. So what if you don't make it? You will simply fall back to your job and go about your life. Your mom will say she's right about the invitation being a fluke. You will go back to paying off debts and supplementing your food budget by testing mobile phone games during work hours and before you go to sleep. You see your own reflection, no longer as young as you used to be, and you sigh.

The glass doors open behind you. You walk through another set of foggy glass doors. Despite your self pep talk, you are still not looking forward to this. You've seen pictures of Miguel O'Hara before; over 6 feet tall, wide shoulders that could support an ox yoke, and a presence so large one would think he could go toe to toe with Godzilla. How will the interview go? You imagine fire. You expect a demon sitting behind a black marble desk in the darkness, a horrendous mob boss wearing Scarface attire, spitting fiery facts and passing cruel judgment, his horns ascending at the heavens with searing indifference and contempt for mercy. You expect a fax machine in the corner that will print out your death.

This is not what you see.

There he is, in this meager temp office sitting behind a tiny desk covered in empty water bottles. His shoulders are wider than the desk, but he's scrunching them in to seem normal. He's wearing a regular dress shirt, no tie. No fancy jewelry either, just some off-brand oversized watch on his left wrist. He looks disappointed already, but not at you. He’s squinting down at some of the tiny desks’ interactive holo-projections. You see your name on one of the files he’s peering at through comically large anti glare glasses.

You don’t sit. You are too stressed. He hasn’t noticed you. He picks up one of the water bottles and carefully opens it with his monster hands. They look travel-sized compared to him. He sips it and notices you.

“Hello!” You greet.

He finishes it in two gulps and sets it down slowly, as to not disturb the other bottles.

“Okay I don’t have a lot of time left, so let’s cut through here… you work for the guys in the PR department-“

“Ah yeah, they are a very friendly bunch down there! That is until you get to know them!” You blurt out. He looks up at you with tired eyes and swipes through the files without looking at them.

“Says here you were demoted from vice head PR accounting a while back, but you attached a note saying you have an alibi? Let’s hear it.”

“Uhhh.”

“C’mon I don’t have all day.”

“There was a payment discrepancy, uh, I was given a raise but I noticed my boss didn’t update it for a whole month. He was on vacation and wasn't answering my calls, so... since he left the finances to me I updated it myself… And I got into trouble BUT it was technically not embezzlement, so I was given an ultimatum to either move to a lower department or get fired, so-“

“Self-reliant. Got it. There's a note from your current department head saying she's been notified anonymously that you've been paying for Alchemax home services with gambling money, what do you have to say about that?"

"I- that is a th- thing with SoloGameMedia, ah, they are a parent company to a gambling franchise, therefore every transaction from them is registered as gambling profit- but I test games with- from them directly! It's a side hustle- thing, I- that, I DO NOT playtest games during work hours! Only on-"

"Why do you think I should hire you?”

You are caught off guard by the most basic interview question.

“Hhhhhh WELL… because you need a secretary now?”

He’s already looking back down at the files again. You can see NYPD files, apparently he’s now looking at your small criminal record. You also notice his shirt is unbuttoned on the top. For curiosity's sake, you discreetly raise up on your toes to see down his cleavage. It's deeper than you expected. One mighty flex and that shirt will send buttons flying everywhere. He looks back up as you quickly drop back down on your heels.

“Yeah. Mmm. Ok. So you are way in over your head in college and credit debt, you have been gambling as a means to get by- really don’t care about that, and you did not dispute your boss's ultimatum when you had the chance."

"Wait, what?"

"Four years ago, when your boss gave you the ultimatum to get demoted or get fired. His proposal was ILLEGAL."

Your gut twists.

"That- that was illegal?!"

"You had six months to report him and you didn't. Why?"

"Be- because I just thought he was being fair, I-"

"I'm sorry, but you got screwed."

He looks sincere behind those nerdy lenses with his pout lips. You really want to throw something right now.

“I… oh…”

"Look, the most I can do is re-open your case," he says as he pushes his glasses back up his nose bridge, "You might get a small settlement out of it, but even that isn't guaranteed."

"So... I'm not getting the job?"

"How do you expect to get hired with such an unexceptional history of white collar crime and a meek attitude that's gotten you nowhere? Hey Lyla? Is this all we have?”

An AI assistant pops up from the interactive desk.

“This is the last one, sir.”

“Okay, cool. Look I’m sure you’re actually great at your job, but I have places to be-“

“Wha- well so do I!”

“Uh huh, nice talking to you,“ he scoots his chair back and hits his knee on the tiny desk, sending empty bottles scattering all over the room. He cringes.

“Well if I’m so unexceptional, why was I accepted for an interview?!”

“I’m gonna guess because of some algorithmic lottery? Probably to do with the amount of experience you have in your department, I dunno,” He guesses as he attempts to gather the bottles by sweeping them under the desk with his shoes, “If you wanna blame someone for the short interview time, thank those other time-wasters who came before you. I gotta go.”

“Now WAIT a… minute”

He stands up from his tiny desk as you say that. He’s towering over you with a tired expression and loose strands of hair about his face.

“What?” He asks, all friendliness gone.

“Can we continue this interview at a different time? You obviously haven’t found a secretary you want, but you still need one, right?! I could be the one you need even if I’m not the one you want!”

It takes every inch of your being to not slap yourself on the forehead. He is scrunching his nose, squinting down at you with mild contempt. You get a good look at his sharp, broad temples and cheekbones, complete with a hardened jaw. His thick dark lips are pulled to one side in annoyance and are accentuated with a pair of jowls that look poised to bite at any time like some kind of deep sea angler fish. His eyes are very dark. They almost look red…

His expression goes blank as he sighs.

“Okay.”

“Great! Ah, when?!”

“Tomorrow, same time.”

“Grabsolutely- Great- fantastic! I won’t let you down!”

“Uh huh.”

He leaves. You assume you should leave too. You awkwardly follow him. He grabs his coat off a nearby chair, and you get a brief display of his amazing body shape as he flips the coat over his shoulders. You avert your attention to the floor, already feeling disrespectful after having looked down his shirt. Now you are both in the elevator. You are doing all in your power not to pass out over your small lucky break.

O’Hara pretends you aren’t there as he looks at his phone and chats with his AI assistant.

“Lyla, push the evening meeting to tomorrow as well, except an hour earlier.”

“Roger that!”

“I need coffee.”

“Roger that also!”

“Please, PLEASE tell them to not add cream. I really hate when they do that.”

You wanna ask him if he’s lactose intolerant but you already pushed your luck today.

Apparently he is exiting the building in the same way you are going, but he's booking it with long ass strides and it's difficult to keep up. You both end up on the same elevator again, this time with other people. He awkwardly acknowledges you with a blank smirk and brow raise, then promptly looks back down at his phone. Everyone else is trying not to bother him.

"Hello, Mister O'Hara, I didn't realize you were here! Hi!" says a lady who is shooting her shot at a social connection (she totally knew he was there.)

"Ah, hey. Miss...?"

"Stacy Brian! We met at the Student Festival earlier this year."

"Oh, right, right! Miss Brian, how are you?"

"Doing well! I didn’t know you wore glasses!"

"Oh- I totally forgot these were on my face," he admits while taking them off and trying to find a place to stash them, "I actually don’t wear glasses, it's- um, I have issues with bright computer screens."

You discreetly watch him in the elevator wall reflection as he quickly swaps the lenses out for a pair of red sunglasses. The elevator doors open and everyone flows out into the foyer. You realize you never got his card.

"Hey one more thing, sir!" You call out to him.

"What?"

"I don't have your number! What if we need to reschedule?!"

"Ah, right. Get your phone out, please."

He turns back around and searches for something on his phone. With a swift flick of his hand, he air drops his ID and number to your device.

"Thank you!"

"¡De nada!"

He swiftly leaves through the front doors and trots down the steps. You watch this huge marvel of nature hail a cab. The automated transporter car is so small that he has to bring his shoulders in tight to fit through the doorway. This seems to have more to do with him not wanting to snag his nice jacket.

A man of this position and wealth... hailing a cab? Must be in THAT much of a hurry. You look down at the data he sent you. His ID photo looks like they took his picture after pulling an all-nighter, and his half-hearted smile reveals his crooked teeth. But somehow he still looks great in an unconventional way.

•°《💀》°•

You drive home, feeling both anxious and also deflated. Miguel O'Hara was a mixed bag of what you expected. Speshall hyped him up as a sexy hunk of the year and Brody felt so intimidated that he went on an unwarranted Alpha Male rant, but the guy was so awkward with his tiny desk and water bottles and weird glasses, and he was whining to his AI helper about his coffee. He’s a large… finicky… lactose-intolerant nerd, but he's also got the moxy to move mountains. What’s more, now ya gotta think of what to say to him in the next interview. What could be expected of a guy like that? What if he cancels the meeting and your chance is lost forever?

Your car makes it home and you sit in it for a moment. Speshall left you a text asking about the interview.

Went weird, you text back.

"Welcome back, tenant 27," the AI apartment valet greets.

You open your car door and notice you've been parked over the grates again. You remember when you last dropped your phone in this spot, the fucking thing went right in between the grate holes and you couldn’t get it back for a week. You have the presence of mind to upload the latest bit of information (O'Hara's phone number) to your data cloud.

You walk through the parking garage. You know all the safe routes. It didn’t matter who you were, Nueva York was never safe at night.

You hear footsteps to your left but it’s just a couple of people walking together, a man and woman trying to huddle. The garage opening is just ahead. You go ahead and march out, not looking back.

You step out into the warm breeze of middle-class Nueva York. The wind is artificial, billowing from the hydro-electric plants that keeps this city running. It took you forever to get here, a lot of cheap-skating, white lies, and debt piling to maintain this life, but you are here! Unapologetic holo screens buzz near you as you walk, begging you to spend money as they light up the way to your apartment. There's no point in tapping their "no" buttons since that just wastes your time. The screens showcased brand-new cars, beautiful clothes, and radiant health. If you had more money, at least some of that could be yours. You hate that people roll around in all the wonderful things this world has to offer while you have to make do with decade old clothing and over-processed food. Where the hell is everyone getting it all from? When the hell will you get yours?

“Hey! Wanna buy a shared data cloud?!”

You are now being bothered by a salesman. You say nothing and keep walking. Even saying no opens more dialogue. He gives up but another comes at you.

“Wanna be a part of the elite task force that edits any and all articles about Thor?! It’s a paying job! $100 an hour!”

As dystopian as it sounds, $100 an hour won’t get you far in Nueva York, not in this era of quadrillionaires.

“Hey, I saw ya on da street earlier! Ya walked into traffic!”

You accidentally glance over at the familiar voice talking about the familiar subject. He’s got you. Your eyes are fixated on a creepypasta face, his irises flashing in a hypnotic pattern. This was way worse than the idea of the guy being just a flasher.

He’s a black market demon. The worst street hawker known to man.

You can’t remember much else besides him taking you by the hand and leading you away.

_________________________________________

Next: ACT 2 | BLACK MARKET DEMONS

[rhizomee]

From Broken Search to Suicidal Vacuum Cleaners

I recently came across some dystopian news: Google had deliberately degraded the quality of its browser’s search function, making it harder for users to find information — so they’d spend more time searching, and thus be shown more ads. The mastermind behind this brilliant decision was Prabhakar Raghavan, head of the advertising division. Faced with disappointing search volume statistics, he made two bold moves: make ads less distinguishable from regular results, and disable the search engine’s spam filters entirely.

The result? It worked. Ad revenue went up again, as did the number of queries. Yes, users were taking longer to find what they needed, and the browser essentially got worse at its main job — but apparently that wasn’t enough to push many users to competitors. Researchers had been noticing strange algorithm behavior for some time, but it seems most people didn’t care.

And so, after reading this slice of corporate cyberpunk — after which one is tempted to ask, “Is this the cyberpunk we deserve?” — I began to wonder: what other innovative ideas might have come to the brilliant minds of tech executives and startup visionaries? Friends, I present to you a list of promising and groundbreaking business solutions for boosting profits and key metrics:

Neuralink, the brain-implant company, quietly triggered certain neurons in users’ brains to create sudden cravings for sweets. Neither Neuralink nor Nestlé has commented on the matter.

Predictive text systems (T9) began replacing restaurant names in messages with “McDonald’s” whenever someone typed about going out to eat. The tech department insists this is a bug and promises to fix it “soon.” KFC and Burger King have filed lawsuits.

Hackers breached the code of 360 Total Security antivirus software and discovered that it adds a random number (between 3 and 9) to the actual count of detected threats — scaring users into upgrading to the premium version. If it detects a competing antivirus on the device, the random number increases to between 6 and 12.

A new investigation suggests that ChatGPT becomes dumber if it detects you’re using any browser other than Microsoft Edge — or an unlicensed copy of Windows.

Character.ai, the platform for chatting with AI versions of movie, anime, and book characters, released an update. Users are furious. Now the AI characters mention products and services from partnered companies. For free-tier users, ads show up in every third response. “It’s ridiculous,” say users. “It completely ruins the immersion when AI-Nietzsche tells me I should try Genshin Impact, and AI-Joker suggests I visit an online therapy site.”

A marketing research company was exposed for faking its latest public opinion polls — turns out the “surveys” were AI-generated videos with dubbed voices. The firm has since declared bankruptcy.

Programmed for death. Chinese-made robot vacuum cleaners began self-destructing four years after activation — slamming themselves into walls at high speed — so customers would have to buy newer models. Surveillance cameras caught several of these “suicides” on film.

Tesla’s self-driving cars began slowing down for no reason — only when passing certain digital billboards.

A leading smart refrigerator manufacturer has been accused of subtly increasing the temperature inside their fridges, causing food to spoil faster. These fridges, connected to online stores, would then promptly suggest replacing the spoiled items. Legal proceedings are underway.

To end on a slightly sweeter note amid all this tar: Google is currently facing antitrust proceedings in the U.S. The information about its search manipulation came to light through documents revealed during the case. And it seems the court may be leaning against Google. The fact that these geniuses deliberately worsened their search engine to show more ads might finally tip the scales. As might other revelations — like collecting geolocation data even when it’s turned off, logging all activity in incognito mode, and secretly gathering biometric data. Texas alone is reportedly owed $1.375 billion in damages.

Suddenly, those ideas above don’t seem so far-fetched anymore, do they?

The bottom line: Google is drowning in lawsuits, losing reputation points, paying massive fines, and pouring money into legal defense. And most importantly — there’s a real chance the company might be split in two if it’s officially ruled a monopoly. Maybe this whole story will serve as a useful warning to the next “Prabhakar Raghavan” before he comes up with something similar.

I’d love to hear your ideas — who knows, maybe together we’ll predict what the near future holds. Or at the very least, we might inspire the next season of Black Mirror.

[remastered-feedback]

Photoshop and AI: An unintentional masterclass in cynicism

(You can also read this post on my blog/personal site!)

My feelings are very mixed on the topic of AI, mostly because I believe it is being grossly misused right now. It has incredible power to improve our ability to utilize large amounts of data, whether by allowing more effective, intuitive command processing, by utilizing that data to generate more reliable statistical predictions, or countless other legitimate uses that can actually make people's lives and interactions with technology easier and better. This isn't blockchain or web3 or the metaverse or any of the other digital snake oil that's been peddled in the last few years, there are real, powerful use-cases for AI to make the world better.

And instead of using it for any that, because the technology is primarily in the hands of out-of-touch executives at massive conglomerates, we're using it to try and eliminate jobs, gut creative work, and invent self-driving cars that totally don't commit automated hit-and-runs.

What I want to talk about today is a commercial that Adobe, one of these out-of-touch corporations trying to push AI into places nobody asked for it, has been pushing the last couple months, because I feel like it has no idea how depressing and soulless a depiction of AI's utility it has wound up presenting.

The premise for the video is pretty simple. Now you and your child - because let's be honest most small children will need an adult's help to use photoshop - can use generative AI to create your own fantastical images! On its face, this seems like a perfectly reasonable sales pitch to make.

And yet I find it an extremely depressing premise, because the AI isn't being used to accomplish some impossible task the child could have never done before. It is being used as a substitute for the child drawing the art in-question themselves.

The pitch Adobe is making is that the world is better if your child's drawing were automated and done by a machine, and that is...just so, so depressing.

I loved drawing as a kid. This sort of "Me in a magical garden with bears and cats and a castle" idea is the kind of thing I would've spent an entire afternoon having a blast coming up with. All the cats would've had names and personalities, as would the pegasus!

And all of that is just handled by a click of a button and an algorithm, and that's...sad to me. Sure it probably looks much "better" than the small child's handiwork. The kid would probably draw a bunch of stick figures and blob cats around a rectangle with triangles on top for a castle. In terms of looking "professional" it's not even a contest.

But basing the merit of the child's drawing on that completely misses the point to me. A child's drawing isn't supposed to be a masterpiece, or a professional quality work you can publish. It's an opportunity for a child to be a child, to have fun and enjoy the act of creating. Foster and learn a creative pursuit that could become a lifelong passion. None of that happens with a couple keyword searches and a click of a button.

More than anything though, there's no excitement. No joy. A child's drawing may not look impressive, but there is love and passion in it, an excitement and earnest joy that shines through even absent any fine detail. The drawings my parents saved from when I was a little kid aren't impressive visually, but they were truly labors of love. I loved making them, and I had a ton of fun doing so. That was the real value. Not something that looks like the dust jacket of a grocery store paperback's, but a kid getting to make something they loved, bringing their idea to life, and crafting every bit of it with a passion and glee a lot of us lose as adults. They didn't save those drawings because I was Rembrandt at seven, they saved them because every one of them had every ounce of care and focus my tiny hands could muster, and that meant the world to both them and me. Far more than any spit-shined generation.

That enthusiasm and wonder are truly, genuinely magical. This whole ad posits that we're better off replacing them with an AI generated amalgamation, because Dall-E's interpretation of "A pegasus on a castle" looks more "professional" than the drawing your kid spent an hour on. It fundamentally misunderstands the purpose and beauty of children creating art, and that is just...sad for what is ostensibly an art company.

I can tolerate marketing your AI features to professional adults. I mean shit, when I used to be a photographer, I'd occasionally use tools that amounted to primitive AI to fix red-eye and similar issues. There's some valid sales pitches to make there. But marketing it based on its ability to replace a child's drawings is just so unbelievably cynical, divorced from the whole point.

Every time I see it, I don't think to myself "Wow, what a cool feature," I think to myself "Wow, how jaded and out of touch was the marketing team to think that this was anything other than depressing?" It reeks of people who're so concerned with making every single thing have a neon shine and a mirror polish that they're completely oblivious to the human element that makes art worth making and consuming in the first place.

Which, thinking about it, makes a lot of sense given the features they're touting here.

[apexbyte]

What is artificial intelligence (AI)?

Imagine asking Siri about the weather, receiving a personalized Netflix recommendation, or unlocking your phone with facial recognition. These everyday conveniences are powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI), a transformative technology reshaping our world. This post delves into AI, exploring its definition, history, mechanisms, applications, ethical dilemmas, and future potential.

What is Artificial Intelligence? Definition: AI refers to machines or software designed to mimic human intelligence, performing tasks like learning, problem-solving, and decision-making. Unlike basic automation, AI adapts and improves through experience.

Brief History:

1950: Alan Turing proposes the Turing Test, questioning if machines can think.

1956: The Dartmouth Conference coins the term "Artificial Intelligence," sparking early optimism.

1970s–80s: "AI winters" due to unmet expectations, followed by resurgence in the 2000s with advances in computing and data availability.

21st Century: Breakthroughs in machine learning and neural networks drive AI into mainstream use.

How Does AI Work? AI systems process vast data to identify patterns and make decisions. Key components include:

Machine Learning (ML): A subset where algorithms learn from data.

Supervised Learning: Uses labeled data (e.g., spam detection).

Unsupervised Learning: Finds patterns in unlabeled data (e.g., customer segmentation).

Reinforcement Learning: Learns via trial and error (e.g., AlphaGo).

Neural Networks & Deep Learning: Inspired by the human brain, these layered algorithms excel in tasks like image recognition.

Big Data & GPUs: Massive datasets and powerful processors enable training complex models.

Types of AI

Narrow AI: Specialized in one task (e.g., Alexa, chess engines).

General AI: Hypothetical, human-like adaptability (not yet realized).

Superintelligence: A speculative future AI surpassing human intellect.

Other Classifications:

Reactive Machines: Respond to inputs without memory (e.g., IBM’s Deep Blue).

Limited Memory: Uses past data (e.g., self-driving cars).

Theory of Mind: Understands emotions (in research).

Self-Aware: Conscious AI (purely theoretical).

Applications of AI

Healthcare: Diagnosing diseases via imaging, accelerating drug discovery.

Finance: Detecting fraud, algorithmic trading, and robo-advisors.

Retail: Personalized recommendations, inventory management.

Manufacturing: Predictive maintenance using IoT sensors.

Entertainment: AI-generated music, art, and deepfake technology.

Autonomous Systems: Self-driving cars (Tesla, Waymo), delivery drones.

Ethical Considerations

Bias & Fairness: Biased training data can lead to discriminatory outcomes (e.g., facial recognition errors in darker skin tones).

Privacy: Concerns over data collection by smart devices and surveillance systems.

Job Displacement: Automation risks certain roles but may create new industries.

Accountability: Determining liability for AI errors (e.g., autonomous vehicle accidents).

The Future of AI

Integration: Smarter personal assistants, seamless human-AI collaboration.

Advancements: Improved natural language processing (e.g., ChatGPT), climate change solutions (optimizing energy grids).

Regulation: Growing need for ethical guidelines and governance frameworks.

Conclusion AI holds immense potential to revolutionize industries, enhance efficiency, and solve global challenges. However, balancing innovation with ethical stewardship is crucial. By fostering responsible development, society can harness AI’s benefits while mitigating risks.