Sarah O'Connor's We Are Not Machines explores how we are contorting ourselves to fit AI into our working lives - and what to do about it, finds Tom Knowles Employers wanting staff to be more like machines isn't new, says O'Connor If you are a fan of translated films, you may have noticed the subtitles on streaming platforms have changed in recent years. They aren't wrong exactly, but they can come across as a bit, well, flat. "You get the meaning, but the language? It's not as rich," Petr Čermoch, a translator in the Czech Republic, tells Sarah O'Connor in We Are Not Machines, which explores how artificial intelligence is changing the way we work. That lack of richness is usually because the streaming platform has used AI to translate a script, then had a professional translator like Čermoch finesse it.

A study of 140,000 people suggests that a broadening of the diagnostic criteria for autism and ADHD explains the sharp rise in diagnoses, but that doesn't mean too many people are being told they are autistic or have ADHD We may be beginning to understand what is behind the recent explosion in diagnoses of ADHD and autism . A study of 140,000 people in Denmark reveals that those recently diagnosed with ADHD or autism have fewer genetic variations associated with them than people diagnosed a decade earlier. This suggests that a broadening of the diagnostic criteria is behind the rise, but it doesn't support claims that ADHD and autism are being overdiagnosed. Diagnoses for autism and ADHD have risen up to tenfold around the world over the past two decades, particularly among girls and adults. Several possibilities have been put forward to explain this, including better awareness and understanding, a broadening of the diagnostic criteria, and even the commercial interests of pharmaceutical companies and private diagnostic clinics.

Fully autonomous drones with no human oversight have killed soldiers on the battlefield for the first time. This is according to a senior figure in the Ukrainian defence industry, marking a watershed moment in warfare. The one-off test involved 10 AI-controlled "Terminator" drones on the front line of the Ukraine war. "We tried it," says drone-maker Alexander Kokhanovskyy, who supplied the technology and spoke to at a press event hosted by the Ukrainian embassy. We never implemented it [more widely]." The test took place two years ago and involved quadcopter drones that were programmed to fly towards the front line, cover between 3 and 5 kilometres over around 10 minutes and then engage "Terminator mode", in which an AI model searches for and intercepts targets. "We just launch it and we know everything will be dead - everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead," says Kokhanovskyy. "There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, ...

A Waymo nearly hit me, but I'm still optimistic about driverless cars A near miss with a Waymo while cycling through London hasn't changed my optimistic stance on driverless cars, but we can't ever let our guard down, says Matthew Sparkes Waymo driverless cars are in London, but is this a positive move for road safety? Waymo's driverless cars have been rolling through London for months, although they aren't taking passengers yet and a human sits ready to seize control if needed. Every time I've encountered them, they have seemed cautious and predictable. But recently, I had a near miss. I was circling a roundabout as I cycled home from work and a Waymo was about to pull onto it in front of me.

Uncrewed ground vehicles have already been tested for defending the front line by the Ukrainian military. There's a received piece of wisdom among militaries around the world that whatever new technologies appear, in the end, foot soldiers are what matters. As British Army officer Field Marshal Archibald Wavell put it shortly after the second world war: "All battles and all wars are won in the end by the infantryman." This may now finally be changing. Robots in battle are about to reach a critical point for Ukraine. In May, it began the mass production of Legit, a low-cost robot capable of carrying a machine gun.

You don't need to worry about recursive-self-improving AI - yet One of the world's leading artificial intelligence companies has implored the industry to pause development on AI, because the latest models could be reaching a tipping point where they become capable of redesigning themselves, growing ever more powerful and finally escaping our control. At least, that's what the headlines said. In truth, Anthropic's co-founder Jack Clark and the boss of spin-out think-tank The Anthropic Institute, Marina Favaro, have published a long blog post bigging up the capabilities of their Claude model, shortly before the company floats on the stock exchange in an initial public offering (IPO) for a rumoured $1 trillion. Let's, for a moment, ignore the vast financial elephant in the room and look at the technological claims. An AI that becomes capable of designing a more powerful version of itself, which is in turn able to pull off the same feat, is an obvious gamechanger, but it is also not a new idea.

Flood of AI'garbage' is pushing open-source developers to the limit A viral cartoon about open-source software shows a teetering pile of boxes labelled "all modern digital infrastructure" and one tiny box right at the bottom, propping up the whole lot: "a project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003". That's the reality of open source: every website, application and operating system relies on it. Modern society couldn't function without it, and yet it's written by volunteers in their spare time. But the growing burden caused by a flood of AI-generated code is causing many to burn out and leave the community altogether, threatening the future of open-source software. 'Flashes of brilliance and frustration': I let an AI agent run my day AI models are making it easier and easier to generate code to build new features, fix bugs or create entire new projects at the click of a button.

A seemingly simple set of rules kicks off a kind of mathematical magic trick, which has kept great minds busy since the 1930s. Almost a century ago, a mathematician came up with a puzzle that was so seemingly simple and yet so fiendishly difficult that it has been distracting other mathematicians ever since. It has become a meme that jumps from brain to brain, with many people claiming to have solved it, only to have their hopes dashed as the proof unravels. And be warned - once I explain the rules, you will immediately want to start playing around with it yourself, and I take no responsibility for how much of your time you waste. It starts a bit like a magic trick.

Despite AI's dizzying improvements in mathematical ability, its successes show just how integral human mathematicians are to the scientific process In 1915, Albert Einstein stood before the Prussian Academy of Science and revealed the now-famous equations of his general theory of relativity. Einstein and relativity are synonymous today with genius, but these revelations were initially met with indifference, in part because the maths was too radical for his peers to fully digest. Today, tech firms would have us believe we are on the brink of "superintelligent" artificial intelligence capable of outperforming experts in most domains, producing scientific breakthroughs on a par with Einstein. As Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei put it, we will see " a country of geniuses in a datacenter ". Claims like these are often provided with little evidence, and identifying genius or elevated intelligence is a murky endeavour.

ChatGPT now processes around 2.5 billion queries every day UN researchers are urging people to be less polite to artificial intelligences after a report found that cutting words from prompts could reduce ChatGPT's energy consumption by up to 25 per cent. Removing "please", "thank you" and other unnecessary words from AI prompts could save 87 to 98 gigawatt-hours of electricity per year, the report from the UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) found. That is the equivalent of the annual residential electricity use of up to 760,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa. 'Flashes of brilliance and frustration': I let an AI agent run my day To reduce their energy consumption and carbon footprint, people should write concise prompts, avoid getting sucked into conversation loops and refrain from starting relationships with AI, the researchers said. "We are not saying be rude to your AI. But don't fall into the interaction trap and don't go falling in love with it either," says Kaveh Madani at UNU-INWEH.