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“I do see this as a continued trajectory of their main business model of controlling what people see, putting ads in front of them, and collecting more data,” Mir says.It’s definitely rational to be anxious about handing over your credit card to an agent. Even if you could trust these AI tools wouldn’t be tricked into spending money in ways you don’t want, outsourcing your shopping decisions can have unintended consequences. Consumer advocates see this purchasing automation as potentially opening the door for companies to prioritize certain brands or other products in an agent’s output, based on sponsorship deals. Meta’s…

Welcome back to Power Play! Each week, senior writer Molly Taft tackles a topic around this midterm season’s biggest issue: data centers. If you’ve got a question or thought for the column, feel free to shoot Molly an email at [email protected] or reach them securely on Signal at mollytaft.76.Molly McCann Sanders has a lot in common with many of the other women who helped Donald Trump win a second term as president. A pro-life Catholic who lives in Texas, she has staunchly conservative opinions on immigration and a fierce hatred of eminent domain—the practice of the government taking private property…

“It is impossible for AI to access a fully autonomous lab and autonomously build a virus today because fully autonomous labs do not exist yet,” says Olivia Scharfman, a biotechnology fellow at the technology think tank Institute for Progress. “But I do think that an AI could pay someone to do it for them.”She thinks AI-assisted bioterrorism is an immediate threat and that there are some groups that might be nihilistic enough to do so, including “transhumanist AI successionists,” people who buy into a fringe ideology who hope to supplant humans with bots.Other experts aren’t so worried about an AI…

Napster is back. The name that struck fear into the hearts of music executives in the early dotcom era may be coming to a classroom near you.In Dubai, United Arab Emirates, it has signed a strategic partnership with Gems Education to build AI agents and digital personas for education. In doing so, the once-notorious music-sharing company is bringing its technology into the classroom and testing how AI can augment the work of both teachers and students.Today’s Napster, of course, bears no resemblance to its original incarnation as a peer-to-peer music-file-sharing service. Launched in 1999 by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, the platform…

For more than a century, World’s Fairs have given people a first glimpse of what’s next: breakthroughs, ideas, and ways of living that would go on to reshape the everyday. WIRED will reimagine that tradition in Miami on November 4 with the WIRED World Fair.This one-day event brings the technologies, people, and cultural forces transforming our world off the page and into real life. At the Sacred Space in Miami’s Wynwood district, we’ll host conversations with luminaries from biotechnology, politics, artificial intelligence, and beyond.The Onion will be there, and a researcher whose life’s work is decoding the language of dolphins.…

Biotechnology3-Year-Old Boy’s Cancer Disappears After He Gets Experimental ImmunotherapyEd Cara | Gizmodo”After his first (CAR T) infusion, he showed signs of a partial response; after his second dose, the remaining cancer in his body appeared to dissipate completely. And as of the 12-month mark, the boy still seems to be cancer-free. Importantly, he also didn’t experience serious side-effects known to occur with CAR T, such as cytokine release syndrome (this syndrome basically sends the entire immune system into overdrive, which can be deadly).”RoboticsJoby Aviation’s 3,100-Mile Autonomous Flight Signals Its Push Beyond Electric Air TaxisKirsten Korosec | TechCrunch”Joby Aviation said the…

Welcome to the inaugural edition of Kernel Panic! A weekly newsletter by Lily Hay Newman and Matt Burgess from inside the new world of privacy and digital security. To receive this newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up here.AI doomers have recently traded one worst-case scenario for another, putting aside a potential software vulnerability apocalypse to focus on the possibility of rogue AI causing mass human death in the next decade. As AI leaders consider a cooperative slowdown on frontier model development, though, one aspect of the cybersecurity sea change has already arrived thanks to existing, broadly available capabilities…

Mathematician Tristan Buckmaster believes OpenAI used his work to rush ahead and beat him to solving a legendary math problem with a $1 million bounty.But that’s not been enough for him to stop using the company’s models—and he’s not the only mathematician that feels that way.“Even if you don’t agree with any of this, you’re kind of stuck. With AI being so useful, it’s hard to completely prevent oneself from using it,” Buckmaster tells WIRED. “These companies have a monopoly, and there is not much choice,” he adds.In the week and half since the New York University professor accused OpenAI…

Uh oh, we got a cute alert! It’s Bezzy, your adorable, cuddly, anthropomorphized server-rack and stuffed-animal friend! Give this soft lil’ doll a squeeze, and it shall sing you its telltale song: the piercing, grinding ambient squeals emitted from a real US data center.The Bezzy doll is a stuffed plushie made in a satirical collaboration between the New York–based creative studio Basura and Big Data, the musical project of producer Alan Wilkis, best known for the song “Dangerous,” a 2013 collaboration with the band Joywave. The joint project, which is coming out the same day as a new Big Data…

In early 2025 I was interviewing Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei when he explained why, despite the company’s repeated acknowledgments that AI could yield catastrophic results, people seemed largely unperturbed. “There is compelling evidence that the models can wreak havoc,” he said. But, he added, those dangers were still theoretical. Would it take a Pearl Harbor–like situation for the world to wake up to those dire possibilities? He sighed. “Basically, yeah,” he said.As it turned out, all it took was a well-timed X post from one of Amodei’s junior employees to accelerate AI fears to the top of the global agenda.…