Will Gulf states join war? Game Theory: Are Iran's athletes political pawns? Game Theory Are Iran's athletes political pawns? While in Australia, members of Iran's women's football team found themselves at the centre of an international political storm. As several players choose to return home, difficult questions are being raised about athlete safety, agency and Western intervention.

The job's only prerequisite is having an'extensive personal history of being let down by technology'. The job's only prerequisite is having an'extensive personal history of being let down by technology'. US startup advertises'AI bully' role to test patience of leading chatbots Imagine a day at work where your main task is to pick a fight with a computer. No meetings, no emails - just you, a chair and a chatbot with the maddening tendency to think it has the cleverest mind in the room. The job title alone raises an eyebrow: "AI bully".

Amazon's Alexa has had an AI upgrade. Now she's got more to say Amazon's Echo smart speaker - more commonly known as Alexa - is getting an AI-powered upgrade which will roll out across the UK. Alexa+ turns the digital assistant into a more chatty device which Amazon says will be able to follow threads and be more proactive in its responses. There has been criticism the Echo has stagnated since its launch in 2016, while AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude have become much easier to communicate with. It will be interesting to see how users react to this - we expect this could be polarising, with some enjoying the more relaxed, familiar interactions while others may find it disconcerting, said Jessica Miller, head of data insights at FDM/CCS Insight. UK consumers will notice an immediate difference, she added.

Steve Rose goes for a spin. Steve Rose goes for a spin. 'We don't tell the car what it should do': my ride in a self-driving taxi Driverless'robotaxis' will be accepting fares in Britain's biggest city by the end of next year. Can they deal with London's medieval roads, hordes of pedestrians and errant ebikers? 'I'm really excited to show you this," says Alex Kendall, the CEO of Wayve, as he gets behind the wheel of one of the company's electric Ford Mustangs. The car pulls up to a junction at a busy road in King's Cross, London, all by itself. "You can see that it's going to control the speed, steering, brake, indicators," he says to me - I'm in the passenger seat. "It's making decisions as it goes.

An engineer at the AgiBot factory in Shanghai, China, where the 5,000th mass-produced humanoid robot had rolled off the production line. An engineer at the AgiBot factory in Shanghai, China, where the 5,000th mass-produced humanoid robot had rolled off the production line. How close are we to the sci-fi vision of autonomous humanoid robots? C hen Liang, the founder of Guchi Robotics, an automation company headquartered in Shanghai, is a tall, heavy-set man in his mid-40s with square-rimmed glasses. His everyday manner is calm and understated, but when he is in his element - up close with the technology he builds, or in business meetings discussing the imminent replacement of human workers by robots - he wears an exuberant smile that brings to mind an intern on his first day at his dream job. Guchi makes the machines that install wheels, dashboards and windows for many of the top Chinese car brands, including BYD and Nio. He took the name from the Chinese word, "steadfast intelligence", though the fact that it sounded like an Italian luxury brand was not entirely unwelcome. For the better part of two decades, Chen has tried to solve what, to him, is an engineering problem: how to eliminate - or, in his view, liberate - as many workers in car factories as technologically possible. Late last year, I visited him at Guchi headquarters on the western outskirts of Shanghai. Next to the head office are several warehouses where Guchi's engineers tinker with robots to fit the specifications of their customers. Chen, an engineer by training, founded Guchi in 2019 with the aim of tackling the hardest automation task in the car factory: "final assembly", the last leg of production, when all the composite pieces - the dashboard, windows, wheels and seat cushions - come together. At present, his robots can mount wheels, dashboards and windows on to a car without any human intervention, but 80% of the final assembly, he estimates, has yet to be automated. That is what Chen has set his sights on. As in much of the world, AI has become part of everyday life in China . But what most excites Chinese politicians and industrialists are the strides being made in the field of robotics, which, when combined with advances in AI, could revolutionise the world of work.

Humour and science fiction may not seem obvious bedfellows but a history of cinema will tell you different. Think Spaceballs, Mars Attacks! and Everything Everwhere All At Once to name but a few. And now Ryan Gosling is hopping on board. The 45-year-old is both the lead actor and producer of Project Hail Mary, a space adventure film based on the 2021 Andy Weir novel of the same name. While Gosling has showcased his comedy chops in films such as Barbie and Nice Guys, he tells the BBC he's always struggled as an actor because I would want to bring humour to something but has found opportunities to be funny limited with some projects.

Sony removes 135,000 'deepfakes' of its artists' music Music giant Sony Music says it has requested the removal of more than 135,000 songs by fraudsters impersonating its artists on streaming services. The so-called deepfakes were created using generative AI, and targeted some of the company's biggest acts, who include Beyoncé, Queen and Harry Styles In the worst cases, [the deepfakes] potentially damage a release campaign or tarnish the reputation of an artist, said Dennis Kooker, president of Sony's global digital business. The company says the number of songs generated in this fashion is only increasing as artificial intelligence technology becomes cheaper and easier to access. It believes the 135,000 tracks it has discovered to date represents just a percentage of the total uploaded to streaming services. Since last March alone, it has identified some 60,000 songs falsely purporting to feature artists from their roster.

Computer says no. Are AI interviews making it harder to get a job? It's brutal, says Bhuvana Chilukuri - a third-year business student who has applied for more than 100 jobs and has been rejected for every one. There are moments where I applied and I got a rejection less than two minutes later, which is really horrible, says the 20-year-old. She is convinced that very few, if any, of her applications are ever seen by a human as firms are increasingly using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to hire new staff. The first step is AI screening your CV.

A US physicist and a Canadian computer scientist have won this year's Turing Award for their invention of a form of seemingly unbreakable encryption. Charles H Bennett and Gilles Brassard's work, which dates back to 1984, is known as quantum cryptography and has redefined secure communication and computing, the award's body said. Scientists believe their work will be central to electronic communications in a world that depends heavily on data-sharing, but which for years has been trying to develop more powerful quantum computers. The Turing Award, named after the mathematician and code-breaker Alan Turing, is known as the Nobel Prize of computing. It comes with a $1m (£800,000) prize.

'Making people feel powerful' All Will Rise. 'Making people feel powerful' All Will Rise. Why an up-and-coming indie developer is returning Microsoft's money Don't get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? V ideo games are in a funding crisis. Investor money flowed freely during the pandemic gaming boom, but now the well has run dry.