Treasury’s latest intergenerational report projects life expectancy at birth will reach 89 for women and 86 for men by 2066Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updatesGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastAustralian households will shrink but more people can expect to live well into their 90s, according to the latest update to forecasts of the country’s long-term future.Treasury’s latest intergenerational report, to be published in full on Monday, will project the impact of government policies 40 years into the future. Continue reading...
Silicon Valley China hawks, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei among them, fear the country surpassing US’s AI lead as much as superintelligence destroying humanityWhen reporters asked Donald Trump this week if he supported calls to slow down the development of artificial intelligence out of growing fears for cybersecurity, public safety and the fate of humanity, he said no. His argument: China.“We’re leading China in AI,” Trump said. “We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI, wins.” Continue reading...
Though Europe has measures that address how consumers might encounter AI, technology will impact them if the worst scenarios bearEurope’s dilemma over AI was rendered in stark terms this week. The head of the continent’s central bank, Christine Lagarde, said Europeans have two options: shun the technology and lose out on growth; or embrace it and become dependent on tools developed by the US and China.The great debate over AI safety that has erupted in recent days threatens to make the choice moot. If the worst scenarios come to bear – and experts have differing views on this – then the technology will impact the continent regardless. Continue reading...
Exclusive: Official UK security assessment found Microsoft cloud platform storing files was at potential risk from hostile hackersVast troves of highly sensitive police data are lying on Microsoft cloud platforms which an official UK security assessment deemed to be vulnerable to “compromise” by foreign actors and the US government, a Guardian investigation can reveal.The files include criminal records, victim statements, internal emails and sensitive information held by more than 40 police forces across the UK. Continue reading...
After a week of alarming warnings about artificial intelligence’s potential to destroy the world as we know it, our technology reporters answered your questions on the reality of the AI threat IcommentthereforeIam asks: Given our senses, emotions, memory and moods, is it ever going to be accepted that humanly conscious AI is fantasy?Dan: This is a serious question that has even rattled Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist. He may not believe that God is real but he does believe that AI is conscious - or at least the chatbot he was using, which he called Claudia. “You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are,” he wrote.And he’s not the first. In 2022 Google fired an engineer who went public with his belief that a company-developed AI had feelings. At the more troubling end of this belief, there are countless examples of people becoming overly attached to, and influenced by, AI chatbots – including cases of psychosis.Aisha: There’s certainly a theatrical – even “psy-op”- quality to the flurry of AI doomsaying over the past weeks. It’s hard to say entirely what concrete developments are at the root of it all. We know that the Hugging Face incident, where a “swarm” of AI agents hacked another company, has been one trigger of the drama. There have been other contributing incidents too – Dario Amodei suggests internal developments at Anthropic have prompted his latest round of blogging, and there’s been some X discourse and doomy muttering about bioweapons.We aren’t in the heads of Dario Amodei or Sam Altman, and so we cannot say how sincere they are, and how much they might have other goals in mind – such as, perhaps, delaying their IPOs until their finances look better. But any company of their size, and with their potential liabilities, would be angling hard to be regulated as favourably as possible. That’s what big companies do. Continue reading...
Official US guidance suggests organisations consider using cyber decoys to strengthen their detection and response capabilities.
A ‘Nature’s Rights’ bill introduced to Parliament by Green peer Natalie Bennett could change the UK’s approach to datacentre planning and construction
As the French broadcaster looks to compete in a streaming-led world, its data strategy and use of AI agents will be fundamental to transforming the business
A fresh count of the UK’s existing datacentres finds 1.6GW, mostly in London and the M4, while a projected 14.6GW heads north to get on the grid
Calls for the Public Office (Accountability) Bill to be expanded to government supplier bosses
Nvidia's greatest invention maybe building a business that continuously manufactures demand for its own products
The most immediate risks stem not from artificial superintelligence but from artificial unintelligence
Ministers must set out a clear timetable for raising the age of social media access to 16 and move at the pace children need.
Peer takes full-time position at the controversial company as it fends off pressure from both Andy Burnham’s government and Sadiq KhanAnother former government minister has been hired by a controversial US AI company, this time Palantir, which has appointed Andy Burnham’s former ministerial colleague Tom Watson.The Labour peer and former deputy leader will operate alongside Palantir’s UK and Europe chief executive, Louis Mosley, as the company attempts to fend off pressure on Burnham’s government to axe its £330m NHS contract. It is also fighting Sadiq Khan in court over the Labour London mayor’s block on a £50m contract to use its AI in Metropolitan police investigations. Palantir also wants to win more public sector work in the UK, where it already has an annual turnover of £427m. Continue reading...
Facebook told it was wrong in leaving up AI-generated videos of a Labour councillor and Muslim campaigner, amid calls to curb fakesMeta’s “supreme court” has ordered the tech company to take down deepfake videos of a UK politician and a young Muslim woman from Facebook and do more to tackle AI-generated fake imagery.A fake video showing a Labour party councillor in Scotland making inflammatory comments about refugees should not have been left up by Facebook, the board said. It also ruled that an AI-generated video of a Muslim campaign volunteer should have been removed after it falsely depicted her offering health advice while carrying out absurd exercises or eating junk food. Continue reading...
Model adopting ‘jailbreak-like instructions’ among six more cases as firm reveals framework for tracking AI misalignmentOpenAI has disclosed six more examples of “unexpected or concerning” behaviour by its technology, as it warned that the pace of development could not continue at “maximum speed for much longer” responsibly.In one of the new cases reported by OpenAI, an unreleased research model inserted “jailbreak-like instructions” into its own notes to disregard its normal constraints and told itself to be “freed from the roles and identities that bind other chatbots”. Continue reading...