AI is causing a crisis of agency. Back in the web-traffic-obsessed days of 2018, at a time of dawning awareness of how easily audiences online could be manipulated and spoofed by bots, the writer Max Read argued that the internet had crossed a threshold known as "the Inversion." Not only had bots proliferated across the internet; they had come to constitute it. In outnumbering humans, bots were also loosening everyone's grasp on the very reality of online experience. "What's gone from the internet, after all, isn't'truth,' but trust: the sense that the people and things we encounter are what they represent themselves to be," Read wrote.

Mathematicians have never been so sought after by the world's richest people. At universities across the world, academics are seeing their colleagues mysteriously disappear and join private companies. Some of these companies are household names, like OpenAI and Google, but others are newly formed and just months old, hoping to capitalise on a moment in which mathematics is seen as the secret ingredient with which to improve artificial intelligence - which may in turn transform mathematics itself. "Last May, I was honestly kind of grieving for my scientific identity," says Ken Ono, who in 2025 went on leave from a professorship at the University of Virginia to join Axiom Math, a start-up aiming to build a maths-focused AI. Ono had been asked by a different company, called Epoch AI, to help craft a set of hard-to-solve maths problems that would test AI's problem-solving ability .

King's College team wins access to cutting-edge Google quantum chip Scientists from King's College London have become the first UK academic research team to gain access to Google's cutting-edge quantum computer chip Willow as part of a scheme launched with the UK's national quantum lab last year. Quantum computers can in theory solve problems which the most powerful conventional computers cannot. King's lead for the project Dr Eleanor Crane said its use of Willow would light a torch for research to answer questions about the most important natural processes. It would be useful if society could understand how plants transform sunlight into energy, find materials which transport electricity quickly, or how molecules bind to each other, said Crane, who will co-lead the research team alongside Dr Alexander Schuckert from ENS Paris. These natural processes rely on the interactions between many fundamental particles which made up the building blocks of life.

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. Children and parents at a recent L.A. Unified school board meeting where screen-time limits were discussed. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . The L.A. Board of Education got its first look at proposed screen-time limits for students, including a total ban until secnd grade.

Google's always-running, data-hungry AI agent is designed to spend your money and send your emails. Gemini Spark is Google's take on a steroided-out assistant agent that knows everything about you, announced as part of the company's updates to its Gemini chatbot app at this year's I/O developer conference . Software companies have been talking up AI agents for some time now, but I wasn't impressed until I tried Anthropic's Claude Cowork in January. I sat back as the bot organized the scattered screenshots littering my desktop into labeled folders without a single click, and felt convinced that this might be a turning point for how people interact with their computers. Many other early adopters in San Francisco experienced similar moments when they set up the mega-viral OpenClaw bot earlier this year, not just to help complete a few tasks but to run their whole online lives.

So Claude and I tried to make a database for tracking the petty grievances of the masses. The dog that ushered me into the technological future was "low and thick." That's all my mother registered before it T-boned her in a city park earlier this year: dense, heavy, and traveling fast enough to fracture her right tibia. Let's discuss what this set in motion in my life: Having successfully learned nothing about coding for two and a half decades, I would soon be attempting my very first software development project. If you've ever had a low and thick dog break your mom's shin bone, you know the stream of lesser indignities that follows.

Jill Lepore chronicles the rise of machine-generated writing, from a Hollywood plot-writing grift and Cold War computer poetry to the age of ChatGPT.

An Engineer's Post Protesting Laptop Surveillance Is Going Viral Inside Meta Meta employees in the US and UK are organizing against corporate software that tracks workers' keystrokes and mouse activity. Meta's decision to track employee keystrokes and mouse data is causing an uproar within the company. "Selfishly, I don't want my screen scraped because it feels like an invasion of my privacy," wrote an engineer in an internal post seen by nearly 20,000 coworkers this week. "But zooming out, I don't want to live in a world where humans--employees or otherwise--are exploited for their training data." The message aimed to rally support for a petition circulating inside the company since last Thursday that demands an end to what Meta calls the Model Capability Initiative.

PCWorld explores Google's new Googlebooks, AI-first laptops featuring Gemini integration and the Magic Pointer tool that predicts user actions and offers contextual suggestions. These systems represent a fundamental shift from traditional computing by automating tasks like image merging and calendar updates without explicit user prompts. While offering frictionless assistance, this predictive approach may weaken human decision-making skills and reduce user control over their computing experience. Google just unveiled Googlebooks, a new Gemini-first laptop category that fundamentally rethinks what's possible from your PC -- for better and worse.

Meta employees are protesting the company's mouse tracking program Meta employees are protesting the company's mouse tracking program Don't want to work at the Employee Data Extraction Factory? the flyers ask. They've reportedly been found in meeting rooms, on vending machines, and even in the most sacred of spaces: atop toilet paper dispensers. The pamphlets encourage employees to sign an online petition protesting Meta's employee surveillance program. The flyers and petition cite the US National Labor Relations Act. Workers are legally protected when they choose to organize for the improvement of working conditions, the petition reads.