Mike Johnson cancels votes on Thursday, meaning House members will avoid voting on impeaching Pete HegsethUS politics live – latest updatesThe Republican speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, announced on Wednesday that he would again cancel votes scheduled for Thursday, sending lawmakers home one day early ahead of the midterm election recess.The latest change to the legislative schedule means House members will avoid voting on Republican Thomas Massie’s resolution to impeach the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and comes amid a frenzied attempt to propose legislation on artificial intelligence. Continue reading...
Safety crisis makes it more likely that governments will be spurred into action, says Yoshua BengioConcerns over AI safety are reaching a point where governments realise they must act to protect the public, similarly to in the Covid pandemic, according to one of the “godfathers” of the technology.Yoshua Bengio said recent events, including a “swarm” of OpenAI agents hacking a startup and tech insider warnings of an existential threat, were cutting through – making government action more likely. Continue reading...
Doorbell firm aims to replace WhatsApp or Facebook groups with platform where people can post about safety or lost petsAmazon’s doorbell camera maker Ring is to launch its Neighbours community app in the UK in an attempt to supplant neighbourhood WhatsApp or Facebook groups.The service is intended as a modern equivalent of a community message board, where neighbours can post about safety, community matters or lost pets. Continue reading...
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen says technology platforms will have to prove they are safe before children can access them
The content and technology provider has spurned the offerings of AI providers to instead develop an in-house large language model that it believes will bring significant competitive advantage
Trump and Republicans want companies to regulate themselves. It’s a dereliction of duty that will make AI less safeIt is hard to get Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Dario Amodei to agree on much. But over the weekend, all three AI company CEOs called for AI development to slow down in the face of growing, alarming risks. Their employees are sounding the siren too, with one researcher publicly quitting and accusing OpenAI and Anthropic of “gambling with our lives”.The combination of dire warnings from insiders and growing real-world evidence of rogue AIs should, in a sane world, lead to government action. Instead, Donald Trump and the Republican leadership have their heads in the sand. Continue reading...
How Bastien Parizot, senior vice-president of global business services and AI at Reckitt, focuses on business outcomes
Salesforce launches AIforce, an artificial intelligence management layer for its CRM, integrating Anthropic’s Claude, focused on unlocking business value from ‘trapped data’
Statements by OpenAI chief Sam Altman, following an essay by Anthropic chief Dario Amodei, raise concerns over the safety of frontier models
Across a career spent in networking - from research labs to writing about the industry - much has improved, but many things remain familiar, says Computer Weekly's Joe O'Halloran
How John Kindervag went from setting up LAN parties for playing Doom at the office, to creating the zero-trust model of cyber security
In her youth, Computer Weekly's Clare McDonald thought a career in IT looked appealing - until she experienced the uncomfortable truth about attitudes towards women in tech
We examine claims and counterclaims about the risks and calls to slow down the pace of AI developmentThere have been some shocking claims in recent days about AI safety: we face a 10% chance of doom; AIs are worse than nukes; a “botnet” threatens the entire internet; it’s all a big tech psyop.Below, we look at six claims and reactions to them. Continue reading...
Modern cars are fitted with features like autonomous emergency braking and fatigue monitoring. But do they support motorists or drive them to distraction?This new car I’m test-driving boasts all the latest bells and whistles – or, rather, beeps and bings. Peer sideways for too long checking traffic and the car emits an irritating sound. Should I take a hand off the wheel to scratch an ear, I’m admonished with a strident beep.When the car determines it’s too near a white line, it tugs the wheel against my hands and brakes as a car slows ahead. Its haptic “buttons” feel like fingers pressing back – as if an invisible presence has its hands and feet on the controls: a ghost in the machine I’m inside. Continue reading...
The rise of AI-generated tributes and bots for ‘talking’ to the dead has experts concerned more people will grieve in isolationTributes rolled in after the death of Dolly Parton last month. Jack White performed Jolene at a London gig. Kesha sang Old Flames (Can’t Hold a Candle to You), a single her mother wrote for the country music titan. Even Pitbull stopped his Madison Square Garden show to memorialize Parton and all the other “powerful women” in the crowd. But one of the strangest – and most viral – eulogies did not come from a celebrity. It did not even come from a person.Run Jolene, at just under five minutes, is an earworm of a country song, containing all the cliches of the genre: twangy singer, banjo licks, corny lyrics. Those lyrics concern Jolene, the fictional romantic rival made infamous by Parton. “Somebody better warn Jolene / Dolly’s coming through those gates,” the voice croons. “Run Jolene / Girl you better move your feet.” Continue reading...
From Stephen Hawking to Jacob Coxon’s viral Anthropic resignation, fears that AI could threaten humanity have shaken the industry without stopping its pursuit Before an Anthropic researcher resigned and declared human extinction imminent last week, tech leaders and scientists had sounded the alarm about a superintelligent AI ending humanity for over a decade.The development of artificial intelligence “could spell the end of the human race”, warned professor and astrophysicist Stephen Hawking in 2014 – a little less than a decade before the public got its hands on the generative AI features of the original version of ChatGPT. Continue reading...