The doomers have it wrong. AI is not going to end the world--but it is going to end the web as we've known it. AI is already upending the economic covenant of the internet that's existed since the advent of search: A few companies (mostly Google) bring demand, and creators bring supply (and get some ad revenue or recognition from it). AI tools are already generating and summarizing content, obviating the need for users to click through to the sites of content providers, and thereby upsetting the balance. Meanwhile, an ocean of AI-powered deepfakes and bots will make us question what's real and will degrade people's trust in the online world.

Since General Motors acquired the San Francisco self-driving-tech developer Cruise in 2016, the Detroit automaker has poured more than 8 billion into creating a robotaxi service. Now GM is turning off the spigot. On a call with investors today, General Motors CEO Mary Barra said the company would no longer invest in Cruise and its robotaxi services. Instead, GM says it will combine Cruise's efforts on autonomy with its own teams focused on driver-assistance features. Eventually, the combined team will build "personal" autonomous vehicles, the chief executive said.

Once in a while, Silicon Valley is still Silicon Valley. It happened on August 8, 2024, at the opening ceremony for a nuclear fusion energy startup. The events of that day were so astonishing I wish I could blurt them out to you in an instant, like a hologram, but you will need to be patient, as the linear nature of language allows me to unveil only one piece at a time. I had been sensing a malaise for a year or two, a feeling that tech had lost its flavor. The big AI leap was part of it.

For many of the people served by the humanitarian sector, 2024 has been the worst of times. The most recent UN estimates of those forced to flee violence and disaster is a record of 120 million, a figure that has doubled in the past decade. The broader figure of those in humanitarian need, 300 million people, has been swelled by increasingly violent conflict and growing impacts of the climate crisis. Progress in meeting the UN's Sustainable Development Goals has also been either stagnating or declining in more than half of the fragile countries. A child born in those countries has a tenfold greater chance of being in poverty than one born in a stable state.

Alex Smith was 11 years old when he lost his right arm in 2003. He hit a propeller, and his arm was severed in the water. A year later, he got a myoelectric arm, a type of prosthetic powered by the electrical signals in his residual limb's muscles. But Smith hardly used it because it was "very, very slow" and had a limited range of movements. He could open and close the hand, but not do much else.

The results will be presented as a series of bullet points, with Sources underneath: Click or tap on these sources to see the individual emails the information was pulled from. Using the icons alongside the responses, you're also able to copy the text elsewhere, give thumbs up or thumbs down feedback on the Gemini response, or clear the AI chat history. I'm mostly focusing on the summary capabilities of Gemini in Gmail here, but there are plenty of other commands you can explore. In fact, you can ask Gemini just about any question you like about what's in your inbox, and it will at least attempt to provide a response--scouring through the gigabytes of data in your emails looking for answers.

It was evening in Berlin and Alex Kekesi was surrounded by pornstars. Venus, the international adult entertainment convention, was underway, and Kekesi happened to be at dinner with several well-known creators when the discussion shifted to generative AI. Kekesi listened as a few of the women shared similar stories from set. They expressed frustrations about their likeness being exploited. They talked of having to physically cross out language in their contract before filming.

Transforming a car manufacturing plant entering its seventh decade into a futureproof facility, ready for AI-powered autonomous driving, comes with natural challenges. "We had to survey everything and go out with the tape measure," explains Dan Ford, site director at Jaguar Land Rover's (JLR) site in Halewood, Merseyside, England. "But the drawing's measurements were off: we struck a drainpipe." Besides that minor bump in the road (the Great British weather and an August downpour meant work was delayed by 48 hours), JLR's 250 million ( 323.4 million) upgrade of its Halewood plant has been smooth. Off the River Mersey, 10 miles from Liverpool, Halewood has long been synonymous with the British car industry--and JLR is the UK's largest automotive employer.

I review a lot of home office gear for my job, which means my workstation is in flux. A new desk today, another office chair tomorrow--you get the idea. You may have heard of BenQ before--the Taiwanese company makes excellent monitors and projectors--but this lamp is my number one work-from-home accessory. The ScreenBar doesn't take up any desk space, because it hangs over your computer monitor and brilliantly illuminates the desktop. It's a simple little thing, but it brings me a lot of joy, and the company has been iterating on it, with the latest version being the ScreenBar Pro. I'm here to tell you that you should probably get one for your home office.

Amazon's Kindle Scribe entered a saturated digital notebook market in 2022, competing with the likes of Kobo, ReMarkable, and Boox. But the first-gen Scribe had one leg over everyone else: It was also a Kindle. You couldn't annotate directly on ebooks, a standard feature most people would expect on a digital e-paper notebook. This has been rectified on the second-generation Kindle Scribe, and there are a couple of other additions like generative artificial intelligence features and a slightly redesigned Premium Pen stylus, which is now included. But the rest of the Scribe remains mostly the same. It's a great digital notebook for anyone who likes jotting stuff down on paper, and since it pulls double duty as an e-reader, you don't have to carry another Kindle.