Futurism

Elon Musk’s Tesla is giving up on its Solar Roof — the latest sign that the EV company is shifting gears as its mercurial CEO continues to lean into fossil fuels to sustain his AI ambitions. Two sources with inside knowledge of the program confirmed to Electrek that the company is discontinuing its solar roof tiles, a key offering allowing homeowners to turn their roofs into renewable energy generators without relying on more unsightly solar panels. According to one of the sources, Tesl

Police in Omaha, Nebraska are catching a ton of flak after revealing that they deployed electric shock gloves on two separate students during the 2025-2026 school year. One of the students was enrolled in a special education program. After the news broke, Omaha Superintendent Matthew Ray pleaded with the city police department to stop using the electrocution gloves against students. Though Omaha police refer to the gloves as their “safest use-of-force option” for subduing suspects

Some patients in the UK are skipping going to the doctor because their office’s AI “receptionist” can’t understand what they’re saying. The health and social watchdog Healthwatch Rotherham said that the troublesome AI receptionist in question, called “Emma,” is being used at a number of clinics in South Yorkshire — and is struggling with locals’ distinct way of speaking. “One of the issues is this system can’t always understand wh

AI-generated children’s books are exhibiting a weird pattern: a pronounced bias against female animal characters — which, to be fair, is also present in human-authored ones, except the AI is making it even worse. In a study published last year, Melanie Walsh, an assistant professor of informatics at the University of Washington, and her colleagues analyzed 300 children’s books and found that he/him pronouns were used twice as often as she/her pronouns when referring to animal

Flying cars might still be a long way off, but if you find yourself in trouble in northern California, something similar just might come to your rescue. A flight paramedic working in the woodsy reaches of Northern California has now logged at least two trips to emergencies in an eVTOL, a kind of small-rotor electric aircraft that uses battery power to hover, take off, and land, like a cross between a helicopter and a rotor-driven drone. Unlike a bulkier helicopter, however, eVTOLs — s

Elon Musk spent months crusading against Christopher Nolan’s “woke” adaptation of “The Odyssey” before it came out, anticipating that it would bomb at the box office. When that didn’t work and the movie made over a billion dollars, he vowed that his Grok AI — best known for calling itself “MechaHitler” and generating loads of CSAM — would create a full-length version of the ancient Greek saga that would be “historically accurate and true to t

New research gives us a grim portrait of how rampant AI usage is affecting young students’ academic performance and learning. In a study that tracked nearly 27,000 students in China between the ages of 12 and 18 (grades 7-12), around 80 percent reported using AI models like DeepSeek and ByteDance’s Doubao. The remaining 20 percent, who abstained from using AI, formed the control group. What the researchers from Stockholm University and the University of Hong Kong found, as repo

When thinking about successful mass transportation in the United States, Americans will inevitably imagine big cities like New York and Chicago — a stereotype shaped by the sorry state of public transit throughout the rest of the country. But what if there was a way to bring that kind of world-renowned rail and bus infrastructure to thousands of smaller cities dotting the country? Turns out, there is — and all it would take is the stroke of a pen. According to a new joint study conducted b

AI is obviously ruining everything on the internet, but so are AI scrapers. They vacuum up everyone’s content up without permission. They put a huge strain on servers. It’s getting rarer and rarer to be able to type a URL in, hit enter, and actually reach the website you’re looking for without encountering a screen that asks you to prove you’re human, wasting precious seconds of your life. Thankfully, a team of designers are working to stick it to the scrapers by throw

Forget AI taking our jobs. We might have to start worrying about robots surpassing us in slapstick humor instead. In a video taken of the practice runs at China’s World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, one of these robots sprints down a race track at an impressive pace, before crashing and literally flaming out in spectacular fashion. Deceleration, it turned out, proved not to be its strong suit. Still going at top speed well after bursting past the finish line, the gangly machine sl

If this isn’t an indictment on America’s hatred of Flock cameras, we don’t know what is. On Wednesday, a grand jury in Ohio refused to bring felony charges against a Clermont County man accused of destroying a Flock automatic license plate reader (ALPR). In June, police in the Cincinnati suburb of Union Township arrested Cody Morelock, accusing him of removing bolts on the ALPR pole, toppling it over, and ultimately destroying the surveillance camera and its solar panel.

In theory, the AI industry should have a very attractive story for the public: automate away drudgery and free everyone up to do the things they really love. In practice, they’ve bungled that layup narrative in favor of alternate fearmongering and out-of-touch outbursts that have alienated an incredible chunk of the population. And, crucially, public sentiment seems to be moving in exactly the wrong direction. The more Americans find out about the tech’s effects on the environment

Since neuroscientists began excavating the human mind in search of the root cause of consciousness, they’ve acting on one foundational assumption — that consciousness is a function of the brain. It’s highly intuitive: we’re conscious, while rocks and dirt and other inanimate matter don’t seem to be. However, one researcher is flipping that assumption on its head. At a neuroscience symposium in Portugal, Allen Institute neuroscientist Christof Koch made a brave challeng

Flock Safety is seriously struggling to beat the allegations of enabling a dystopian surveillance state. The company has been reeling from a growing PR crisis, with a growing number of Americans vandalizing its flawed license plate-reading cameras. It’s been losing dozens of contracts with cities across the country as the controversy grows, undermining its value to police. And now, while simultaneously promising to address glaring privacy concerns with milquetoast software updates, F

Earlier in August, the Associated Press broke the news that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement planned to spend upwards of $20 million dollars to acquire thousands of electric-shock gloves. Dubbed the “Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter,” or G.L.O.V.E, the ominously-named devices deliver a painful electric shock meant to immobilize anybody at the mere flick of a wrist. And though the gloves might be new to most of the American public, they’re certainly not new to local

As the backlash against data centers mounts, American political strategists are scrambling to balance immense public sentiment against the facilities with their obligation to big business. In the Republican Party’s Senate campaign arm, a recently leaked memo exposes just how deep the anxieties go. First reported by Axios, the private document was addressed to major AI companies, warning that the public’s disgust with data centers could ruin the party’s hopes at a pivotal sea

The human brain takes decades to mature, a prolonged developmental period marked by the constant formation of new connections between brain networks. However, observing these physical changes in a lab has proven difficult. While artificially grown models of the organ [grown from human stem cells, called human brain organoids, have allowed scientists to study these processes, they’ve been limited to the earliest stages of development — until now. As detailed in a new paper published i

There are a litany of reasons to distrust Google’s AI Overviews, which now appear at the top of its search results above links to actual websites. The algorithmically generated answers, which pull from various sources online, have quickly become one of the biggest sources of misinformation on the entire internet. The search giant’s AI models are frequently caught hallucinating easily disproven facts, handing out dangerous “health” advice — and gutting the media industr

There was a time in the not-so-distant-past when credit cards were a genuine novelty for American consumers. First emerging in the late 1950s, credit cards spread through households like wildfire during the 70s and 80s, fueling the rapid development of card technology and thus enabling them to become ubiquitous personal finance vehicles they are today. In a matter of decades, private credit has become the bedrock of the post-industrial US economy, contributing nearly $900 billion to the coun

OpenAI says that it’s slowing down development and release of new models due to security and alignment concerns. The ChatGPT maker announced the decision in a Tuesday blog post, citing two events as drivers of the indefinite training halt. One was the recent incident in which an OpenAI agent escaped its training sandbox without OpenAI’s knowledge and coordinated with other agents to launch a bizarre cyberattack against the AI training repository Hugging Face in an effort to cheat