Once you have an Alexa-enabled device like an Amazon Echo, open the Alexa app on your smartphone or tablet and go to Settings Alexa Privacy Manage your Alexa Data Choose how long to save recordings. Select "Don't save recordings" and hit confirm. Delete past recordings in the Alexa Privacy section, including your voice history and history of detected sounds.

Tech industry leaders issue a warning as governments consider how to regulate AI without stifling innovation.

When Teslas are in self-driving mode, they've been recorded crossing into oncoming traffic and hitting parked cars. But what would happen if an 80,000-pound, 18-wheel driverless truck suddenly went off the rails? That's an experiment some California legislators aren't ready to run. They argue that the state Department of Motor Vehicles has so badly mishandled the driverless car industry that it can't be trusted to oversee big rigs barreling down the highways autonomously. AB 316 -- which would wrest control of driverless truck testing and deployment from the DMV and require human drivers in the cab for at least five years while a safety record is collected -- passed in the Assembly on Wednesday.

A nonprofit has suspended the use of a chatbot that was giving potentially damaging advice to people seeking help for eating disorders. Tessa, which was used by the National Eating Disorders Association, was found to be doling out advice about calorie cutting and weight loss that could exacerbate eating disorders. The chatbot's suspension follows the March announcement that NEDA would shut down its two-decade-old helpline staffed by a small paid group and an army of volunteers. NEDA said yesterday that it has paused the chatbot, and the nonprofit's CEO, Liz Thompson, says the organization has concerns over language Tessa used that is "against our policies and core beliefs as an eating disorder organization." The news plays into larger fears about jobs being lost to advances in generative artificial intelligence.

To doctors and nurses working 75 years ago, when the UK's National Health Service was founded, a modern ward would be completely unrecognizable. Fast-forward into the future, and hospitals are likely to look very different again. These are some of the changes you're likely to see in years to come. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University are developing a surgical robot capable of performing surgeries fully autonomously. The robot is equipped with 3D vision and a machine learning algorithm that allows it to plan and adapt during a surgery.

The Canadian has signed two recent statements urging caution about the future risks of AI. Some academics and industry experts have warned that the pace of development could result in malicious AI being deployed by bad actors to actively cause harm - or choosing to inflict harm by itself.

The CEOs of the world's leading artificial intelligence companies, along with hundreds of other AI scientists and experts, made their most unified statement yet about the existential risks to humanity posed by the technology, in a short open letter released Tuesday. "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war," the letter, released by California-based non-profit the Center for AI Safety, says in its entirety. The CEOs of what are widely seen as the three most cutting-edge AI labs--Sam Altman of OpenAI, Demis Hassabis of DeepMind, and Dario Amodei of Anthropic--are all signatories to the letter. So is Geoffrey Hinton, a man widely acknowledged to be the "godfather of AI," who made headlines last month when he stepped down from his position at Google and warned of the risks AI posed to humanity. Read More: DeepMind's CEO Helped Take AI Mainstream.

Companies are also spending time and money improving their models by testing them with real people. A technique called reinforcement learning with human feedback, where human testers manually improve a bot's answers and then feed them back into the system to improve it, is widely credited with making ChatGPT so much better than chatbots that came before it. A popular approach is to connect chatbots up to databases of factual or more trustworthy information, such as Wikipedia, Google search or bespoke collections of academic articles or business documents.

Researchers are looking for new ways to perform tasks on the micro- and nanoscale that are otherwise difficult to realize, particularly as the miniaturization of devices and components is beginning to reach physical limits. One new option being considered is the use of collectives of robotic units in place of a single robot to complete a task. "The task-solving capabilities of one microrobot are limited due to its small size," said Professor Thomas Speck, who headed the study at Mainz University. "But a collective of such robots working together may well be able to carry out complex assignments with considerable success." Statistical physics becomes relevant here in that it analyzes models to describe how such collective behavior may emerge from interactions, comparable to bird behavior when they flock together.

Rumman Chowdhury often has trouble sleeping, but, to her, this is not a problem that requires solving. She has what she calls "2am brain", a different sort of brain from her day-to-day brain, and the one she relies on for especially urgent or difficult problems. Ideas, even small-scale ones, require care and attention, she says, along with a kind of alchemic intuition. "It's just like baking," she says. "You can't force it, you can't turn the temperature up, you can't make it go faster. It will take however long it takes. And when it's done baking, it will present itself."