artificial intelligence
The future of artificial intelligence.
Why China Is So Much Less Scared of AI
Every evening as our children eat dinner my phone notifies me that our three year old teacher has uploaded photos taken during the day at school An artificial intelligence facial recognition feature puts a red square around his face letting me know which photos to look at It is kind of creepy but kind of helpful too In China surveillance technology and AI surround our everyday life It is built into the way we order food delivered to us from online apps Almost nobody I know here in Shanghai buys groceries at a grocery store so we rely on AI powered technologies to keep us fed It is visible in the infrastructure we use to go to work and school from trains using facial recognition in lieu of physical tickets to self driving taxis China’s technological system offers an unparalleled convenience and AI is such a huge part of it Many American leaders believe the United States cannot overcome its adversary China unless it beats the country in the AI race Every new chip that President Trump approves for sale to China every visit by Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang to Shanghai and every Chinese AI breakthrough strikes terror into the hearts of America’s China hawks Hardware rare earth metals revamped power grids and human talent could all dictate which side ends up creating the first superintelligence The upcoming summit between Mr Trump and China’s leader Xi Jinping may lead to a few policy changes but this belief is more fixed The reality is that China and the United States are racing in different directions because the two countries conceptualize AI very differently Americans want to create the most powerful technology humans have ever known In the quest for superintelligence the US government is encouraging private firms to move full speed ahead regulation be damned Under the very tightest regulation by contrast the Chinese want to make AI more practical and embedded in society more carefully selecting how it is deployed and used by the population If the Chinese achieve their AI goals they may take a lead in the larger geopolitical contest between the two nations Most Chinese policymakers do not believe AI superintelligence is arriving any time soon Instead the Chinese strategy is about advancing a government directed strategy referred to as AI plus that treats AI as if it were infrastructure This includes government coordinated plans local subsidies and national computing power programs to diffuse cheap capable AI tools into every public service Chinese people encounter AI as a natural part of their day to day lives Sometimes it is visible and palpable like the smile to pay terminals used in many shops Sometimes it is invisible like Hangzhou’s City Brain which uses AI to analyze massive amounts of data for urban management needs like regulating traffic and environmental protection Unlike in the United States where most people remain wary AI seems to have had less of a backlash in China The Chinese AI plus strategy is practical and comprehensible to the local population in a way that the US strategy simply is not which may explain why the Chinese appear so much more optimistic about AI than Americans Chinese leaders are trying to maximize the country’s resources The country’s chief resource is not oil soybeans or pork bellies but Chinese people As of the 2020 census nearly 40 percent of Chinese lived in rural areas including 110 million children Even more are living without access to quality education and health care For Chinese leaders the fact that so many Chinese people are structurally denied access to their best lives is a crisis even bigger than the low birthrate How many potential geniuses are there among those 110 million rural children What if the gross domestic product per capita of all of them could be quadrupled AI may be the answer Are the teachers in rural schools overworked and undertrained AI agents can help teach students with personalized instruction Are the hospitals lacking in high quality doctors AI can diagnose diseases by analyzing patients’ health data AI could make it easier to hire and train the caregivers needed for China’s growing elderly population with robotic or digital companions supplementing the work of human nurses AI could also make it easier to predict and prepare for extreme weather events that could set back local economies It could further optimize the transition to green energy China has ports in which machines put containers on ships with barely any human supervision But China’s AI as infrastructure strategy is about more than just improving the country’s domestic quality of life It is also about exporting Chinese influence Chinese AI is already integrated into the supply chains that dominate world trade And increasingly rather than selling individual goods or services China is selling a whole suite energy infrastructure telecoms transportation surveillance with AI systems to manage it all As emerging markets from Southeast Asia to Latin America to Europe seek solutions to large problems like keeping power grids running Chinese AI solutions may be what they end up buying These models do not have to be as powerful as American ones they just have to be powerful enough In that way as China exports those AI models it will be exporting Chinese governance as well with all of the safety abundance surveillance and embedded hierarchies that entails That is why the difference between these two countries in the AI race matters so much America’s spaceship might still be the first to take off But back on planet Earth the Chinese will be using AI to run their hospitals schools roads and more Brazilians Russians Africans and even the Europeans may be doing so soon too Do you see AI in your daily life Would you trust it to run your city Let me know in the comments
By Behind the Tech5 months ago in Futurism
Your AI Note Taker Is a Legal Time Bomb. Lawyers Are Kicking It Out of Meetings
You are reading the DealBook newsletter And if you are in a virtual meeting right now check the participant list Jeffrey Gifford does He is a lawyer in San Antonio who handles corporate governance and M and A at Dykema Before meetings start he plays bouncer When I see that A I note taker pop up I will just say Hey Mike Jim Barbara I am going to turn it off and kick it out of the meeting Gifford told DealBook This happens constantly Everybody and their mother is using these things he said Executives Boards Nonexecutive businesspeople Skipping meetings and sending an A I note taker instead has been called the latest office power move To lawyers it is a ticking legal risk Every Joke Is Now Discoverable A I generated transcripts capture everything Offhand comments Quickly corrected statements Jokes Things humans would never put in official minutes And they show up in meetings that would not otherwise be recorded In a lawsuit or investigation every word becomes discoverable Even worse Sharing the meeting with an A I bot may void attorney client privilege If a third party company has access to the transcript courts may decide your legal strategy is no longer protected The New York City Bar Association issued a formal opinion last year warning lawyers to consider whether recording is tactically well advised One concern is accuracy An A I could record does matter as does not matter Try explaining that mistake in court years later Not Only Accurate But With the Right Emphasis Corporate lawyers also worry about context Board minutes are crafted carefully You want to make sure that the minutes if they get into a courtroom are going to not only be accurate but also are going to have the emphasis that the board would like said Doug Raymond a partner at Faegre Drinker Biddle and Reath The worst case scenarios write themselves An executive talking through an acquisition says it will help the company dominate the category That lands in an antitrust case A board member casually acknowledges a risk Shareholders cite it in a lawsuit Typically private litigation asks for all documents and communications related to a particular topic said Christoffer Lee a lawyer at Pillsbury He expects regulators to start asking specifically for A I transcriptions You are just having to potentially address extraneous stuff that you otherwise would not have Gifford said Does a Bot Break Privilege Executives expect conversations with legal counsel to stay privileged That protection disappears if you share the info with outsiders An A I note taker might count as an outsider Courts have not ruled directly yet but the signals are mixed In February Judge Jed S Rakoff ruled that Claude A I transcripts were not protected because the user had no expectation of privacy Another judge ruled ChatGPT transcripts could not be compelled A I note taking represents the next frontier Lee said They Are Not Fessing Up Raymond says clients got the message fast Initially I was seeing and hearing about it a lot like Oh this is great Now I do not have to worry about writing my corporate minutes But I think people have realized pretty quickly that it is a bad idea Now he says if they are doing it they are not fessing up The productivity hack is tempting The legal exposure is real And as AI bots join more meetings lawyers are left with one job kick them out before the recording starts Do you use AI note takers at work Has your legal team banned them Share your policy in the comments
By Behind the Tech5 months ago in Futurism
AI Isn’t “Taking Your Job” Yet. It’s Taking Pieces of It — And That Changes Everything
New York — AI probably won’t take your job anytime soon. At least not all of it. That’s the uncomfortable truth behind the latest layoff headlines. AI was the top reason companies cited for job cuts in April for the second month in a row, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Block just laid off 40% of its staff. Coinbase cut 14%. Cloudflare says its AI use jumped 600% in three months while headcount shrank. Yet most experts insist AI isn’t replacing entire positions. It’s replacing tasks. **“You Can’t Fire One Quarter of Lisa”** “It’s very few jobs that are actually entirely automated away,” said Alexis Krivkovich, a senior partner at McKinsey. Their research says AI can technically automate 57% of work activities. But that 57% is scattered across “pieces and parts” of different jobs. Nitin Seth, cofounder of consulting firm Incedo, puts it bluntly: “You can’t take one quarter of Lisa, one quarter of Jessica, one quarter of Nitin and make it one person.” His clients boost productivity 20-25% with AI without cutting staff at the same scale. Because AI only handles fragments of roles. Tell that to the engineers at Block and Coinbase. AI now lets them “ship in days what used to take a team weeks,” Coinbase’s CEO said. So the team gets smaller. **From “Software Engineer” to “Builder”** No industry feels this shift more than tech. 90% of tech workers use AI on the job, Google found. 84% of developers use AI tools or plan to, says Stack Overflow. But coding was never the whole job. Engineers review code, design systems, troubleshoot, decide what to build. As AI writes more boilerplate, those other skills matter more. Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code at Anthropic, thinks the job title itself might die. “By the end of the year, we’re going to start to see the idea of software engineering go away,” he told CNN. The new title? Maybe “builder.” Writing code becomes a smaller part of it. Sujata Sridharan, a software engineer for nearly a decade, lives that transition. She uses AI daily, but her job is still problem solving and critical thinking. The execution is just different now: part writing code, part prompting AI. “The skills that are actually required have shifted to, are you able to recognize what is the right code quality?” **The Layoffs Are Real, Even If the Narrative Isn’t** Let’s not sugarcoat it. AI has been cited in more than 49,000 job cuts so far this year. Companies are figuring out what AI can and can’t do, then recalibrating jobs around the human parts. Thousands get cut in the process. Dan Priest, PwC’s US chief AI officer, says whole job categories aren’t currently at risk. But he admits “some job disruption” is coming. And the tech keeps moving upmarket. Anthropic just launched AI agents built for finance work — crafting pitchbooks, writing credit memos. Tasks that used to require junior analysts. “It starts at the bottom, and it keeps going up,” said Umesh Ramakrishnan, cofounder of executive search firm Kingsley Gate. “And I don’t know where it stops.” **So What Now?** Microsoft’s recent report on AI at work found most companies haven’t adjusted employee metrics to match how jobs are changing. They’re still figuring out which human skills matter. For workers, the message is mixed. Your job probably isn’t vanishing tomorrow. But the parts of it that AI can do? Those might. And if enough pieces disappear, companies will redraw the org chart without you in it. The anxiety is real. The black-and-white headlines are wrong. The truth is in the gray area — and it’s where your career now lives. Has AI changed your day-to-day work? Are you doing more with fewer people on your team? Share your experience in the comments.
By Behind the Tech5 months ago in Futurism
I Caught My MIT Students Using ChatGPT to Write Fiction. What Happened Next Changed My Classroom Forever
The moment I started reading my students’ stories, I knew. I’ve taught fiction writing at MIT since 2017. Most of my students are engineers, not English majors. They’re brilliant at solving equations where there’s always a right answer. Fiction is terrifying for them because there isn’t one. So when I opened two stories for our first workshop last semester, something felt off. The prose was too polished. The metaphors too tidy. Every character arc resolved itself like a math proof. It was, as Tennyson once wrote, “Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null. Dead perfection; no more.” I turned to the class and said it out loud: “AI wrote these.” You could hear the radiators ticking. Then came the tears. **The Confession That Broke the Silence** One student admitted she fed her draft into ChatGPT for a “grammar check.” Then it offered line edits. Then structural edits. Then it rewrote the whole thing. She didn’t mean to cheat. She was scared of looking stupid. The other student had never written a story before. He had an idea but no clue where to start. “Why didn’t you ask me for help?” I said. He just shrugged. Then the real discussion started. “Why is it bad if AI writes stories based on our ideas?” one asked. “Isn’t MIT the birthplace of AI? Why are we even debating this?” said another. “Isn’t the point of AI to free us from tedious work?” They weren’t wrong to ask. But they were missing the point of writing itself. **Writing Isn’t Supposed to Be Easy** We think of writing as producing sentences. It’s not. Writing is the training of endurance by way of sustained attention. It’s learning what you think by forcing yourself to say it. An LLM can fake the *appearance* of that activity. It can’t replace it. The value isn’t just the story you turn in. It’s the transformation that happens while you wrestle your messy, half-formed thoughts into language. AI gives you dead perfection. Student writing gives you something better: a foal learning to walk. The prose stumbles. The legs tremble. But in that clumsiness, I see hints of future grace. Take away the stumbling and you take away the learning. A 2025 MIT Media Lab study backs this up. Students who used ChatGPT to write essays showed lower neural connectivity than those who wrote without it. Other papers warn of “cognitive offload” and “executive function attenuation.” Translation: outsourcing thinking makes you worse at thinking. **Why “Good Enough” AI Is Dangerous** George Orwell once described book reviewers who pump out responses without actually responding. AI writing creates the same problem upstream. When a workshop fills with AI-generated fiction, every writer becomes that hollow reviewer. We’re performing the shape of thought without doing the thinking. That’s why my policy is now blunt: I don’t want your AI. I want *your* words. I want your voice, your struggle, your failure. Because the workshop only works if there’s a writer in the room. Using AI to write fiction doesn’t just give you a bad story. It guarantees you’ll weaken the muscles you need to wrestle with writing at all. The danger isn’t that AI will replace writers. It’s that we’re getting comfortable bypassing the friction that reveals who we are. **What We Gained by Banning AI** Since that night, my workshops changed. We talk openly about frustration. About drafts that fight back. We still teach structure and revision, but we spend more time on the gap between thought and language — and why that gap matters. Your struggle to translate thoughts into words isn’t failure. It’s proof you’re growing. Especially when the words fail. We’re not building a wall against machines. We’re guarding a sanctuary for authorship. A place where everything on the page, and everything *not yet* on the page, belongs to an actual person. And that’s something no algorithm can fake. Have you used AI for writing? Did it help or hurt your process? Tell me in the comments.
By Behind the Tech5 months ago in Futurism
Authorship vs Refinement
Much of the confusion surrounding artificial intelligence and writing comes from a failure to distinguish between two fundamentally different acts: originating ideas and refining their expression. These acts are often treated as interchangeable, as though whoever touches the final form must also be the source of the thought itself. That assumption does not reflect how writing has ever worked, nor does it reflect how human thinking actually unfolds.
By Peter Thwing - Host of the FST Podcast5 months ago in Futurism
The "Un-Automatable": Why Your Human Flaws are Your Greatest Career Asset in 2026. AI-Generated.
I recently watched an AI try to write a condolence letter. It was grammatically perfect, structured beautifully, and completely soulless. It used words like "deeply saddened" and "heartfelt sympathy," but it lacked the one thing that makes a message matter: Shared suffering. The AI hasn't lost a grandmother; it hasn't felt the sting of a goodbye. It was just predicting the next likely word in a sequence of grief. As we move deeper into 2026, the initial panic about AI taking our jobs has shifted into a more nuanced reality. We’ve realized that while AI can calculate, simulate, and generate, it cannot care. It doesn't have a stake in the outcome. This realization is creating a massive boom in what economic analysts are now calling the "Empathy Economy." In this new era, the most secure professional path isn't mastery of tools, but the mastery of being human.
By Ahmed Tolba5 months ago in Futurism
Tools That Empower and Tools That Numb
A tool is never neutral in its effect, even when it may be neutral in its design. What a tool does to a person depends not only on what it enables, but also on what it quietly replaces. A hammer extends the hand. A calculator extends memory. A map extends orientation. Each tool amplifies a capacity, but each one also changes the relationship between effort and outcome.
By Peter Thwing - Host of the FST Podcast5 months ago in Futurism
Agata Lukaszczyk and the Future of Scalable Robotics Systems. AI-Generated.
Agata Lukaszczyk is a robotics engineer specializing in autonomous systems and human–robot interaction. She designs intelligent robotic platforms using advanced sensors and machine learning. In her work, Agata Lukaszczyk focuses on building systems that can move beyond controlled laboratory conditions and operate reliably in complex, real-world environments. Her engineering approach reflects a growing shift in robotics where success is defined not only by innovation in prototypes but by long-term performance, adaptability, and deployment readiness in unpredictable settings.
By Aga Aleszczyk5 months ago in Futurism
The Nimitz UFO Incident and the Navy Sailors Who Witnessed the Mysterious “Tic Tac” Craft
A UFO Encounter That Still Puzzles the World In November 2004, a group of U.S. Navy personnel serving aboard the aircraft carrier strike group led by the USS Nimitz witnessed one of the most mysterious aerial incidents in modern military history. The event occurred roughly one hundred miles off the coast of Southern California during routine naval exercises. What began as strange radar anomalies soon developed into a series of encounters involving Navy radar operators, fighter pilots, aviation technicians, and crew members who all observed or recorded an unidentified object later described as a glowing white “Tic Tac”-shaped craft.
By History Seeker5 months ago in Futurism
Video Conferencing Market Expands Rapidly as Hybrid Work and AI Transform Global Communication. AI-Generated.
Video Conferencing Market Overview The global video conferencing market is evolving into a cornerstone of modern communication, driven by the widespread adoption of hybrid work models and digital collaboration tools. What began as a convenience for remote meetings has now become a critical infrastructure for businesses, education systems, healthcare providers, and government organizations. According to Renub Research, the market is expected to grow from US$ 12.42 billion in 2025 to US$ 24.75 billion by 2034, reflecting a CAGR of 7.96% from 2026 to 2034.
By Arpi Kumari5 months ago in Futurism
GPT vs Gemini vs Claude
Every week, millions of people open ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude and ask it something important — a career question, a creative idea, a medical concern. These tools have quietly become a part of how we think, work, and decide. But here is the question nobody answers honestly: which one is actually better?
By Mind Meets Machine5 months ago in Futurism
