Are You Sure You Want a Car With a Giant Touch Screen? The AI boom is making phones and laptops more expensive. New drivers may never have to learn how to parallel park. Many new cars--a Ford Mustang Mach-E, a BMW sedan, a Tesla Cybertruck--will just maneuver into a spot for you with a click of a button. Even a decade-old Toyota Corolla has a backup camera and pedestrian detection.

A women uses the new IBM 650 Magnetic Drum Data Processing Machine in a New York office in 1954. A women uses the new IBM 650 Magnetic Drum Data Processing Machine in a New York office in 1954. Many hoped that the march of technology would usher in an egalitarian utopia - but some foresaw the threat it would pose to liberal society. One of the stranger things about this dizzying, headlong moment in time is that it doesn't have much of a past. Everything is about the future of this, the future of that: the future of work, the future of humanity, the future of the planet. It's as if everyone is screaming (some ecstatically, most terror-stricken): robots are taking over the world! Meanwhile, you can't put down your phone, unplug, delete your AI apps, tell Zoom to piss off; it feels as if you are racing toward something, and can't stop, or look back, or think straight. But of course this weird moment in history does have a past. Things could have turned out differently.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. The GMKtec M3 Pro comes with an Intel Core i5 processor, 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and a wide range of ports. Two M.2 slots allow for storage expansion in the terabyte range The GMKtec M3 Pro is a solid office computer with decent multithreaded performance, a generous range of ports, and a high-quality chassis. However, the platform is showing its age: When it comes to graphics and AI performance, the latest Core Ultra and Ryzen AI models are clearly ahead. Mini PCs are increasingly finding their way onto desks and into living rooms.

MouthPad is a hands-free touchpad that fits inside the mouth, allowing cursor control with tongue movements. The assistive technology connects like a Bluetooth mouse.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. ActivityWatch is a free app that tracks your computer use while keeping all of your data locally on your device. Have you ever reached the end of a day spent on your computer and asked, "Where did all that time go?" Between work, surfing the web, and playing games, it's easy to lose track. ActivityWatch is a free, open-source app that shows how you use your computer. It can help you spot what keeps you on task and what pulls you away.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. The next time someone asks for PC help, don't explain it--show them! If someone asks you how to do something on your computer, how do you respond? There are in fact many ways to show people how to perform a task, and this edition of Smart Mode gives you my favorites. "Hey, can you show me how to do this?"

Beyond Elon Musk's interpretation of, Silicon Valley leaders have often misunderstood classic books like and . Why does anyone care what Elon Musk thinks of Homer's, or Christopher Nolan's? Musk is promising to use AI to generate a "historically accurate" version of the --turning epic poetry into atrocious slop--even as AI companies are literally destroying books to ingest them as data more cheaply. Meanwhile, Musk and other Silicon Valley billionaires are building a world they read about, as boys, in the pages of books they failed to understand. I think of that world as the Artificial State.

From branding irons to iris scans, the ancient business of proving who you are has never been stranger--or more lucrative. There are now more bots online than people. The challenge used to be telling who was a person from who was a bot; today, the challenge is telling good bots and bad bots apart--with humanity in the lurch. Three summers ago, Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, posted on X a fifteen-second video of dozens of people--mostly young, veiled in face masks, and wearing super-hip, white-soled sneakers--waiting in a long, snaky line in the traffic-light-lit but otherwise dusky dark of an unnamed city that appears to have been Nagoya, Japan. "Crazy lines around the world," Altman wrote. "One person getting verified every 8 seconds now." In the video, the camera pans to the front of the line, where a woman is kneeling on the sidewalk as if in prayer, staring into a gleaming silver orb about the size of a volleyball that has been propped up on a stand about the height of an end table. It looks like the eyeball of a giant robot Cyclops. She is bowing before an artificially intelligent machine, seeking a certification that she is human. That eyeball, which is known as the Orb, was developed by Tools for Humanity, a San Francisco-and Munich-based tech company that Altman founded in 2019 with a twenty-five-year-old German physicist named Alex Blania, who is now its C.E.O.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. PC building is more fun when you have no idea what you're doing A strange little hacker gadget reminded me that confusion, failure, and experimentation were always the best parts of building computers. I don't know about you, but the whole reason I got into upgrading and building PCs is because I wanted to play . My age hadn't hit double digits by the time the game shipped on DOS in '94, but a year or two later I got my hands on a copy and realized our old family PC didn't have the chops to run id's latest. Thus began my 30+ years of PC enthusiasm, starting with me getting frustrated by memory management (death to HIMEM) and leading me here as a PCWorld veteran who can work a screwdriver and a solder gun almost as well as anyone.

PCWorld explains how summer heat threatens PC performance through thermal throttling, where CPUs reduce speed at 100 C (Intel) or 95 C (AMD Ryzen) to prevent damage. Essential solutions include cleaning dust buildup, monitoring temperatures with HWiNFO software, adjusting Windows power settings to disable Turbo Boost, and adding case fans for better airflow. Laptop users benefit from cooling pads that reduce temperatures up to 20 degrees, while replacing thermal paste every 3-5 years maintains optimal heat transfer. When heatwaves strike in summer, any chance to cool down is welcome -- whether at the lake, in an ice-cream parlor, or at home in front of a fan. What's a relief for us is also something your computer desperately needs as soon as the thermometer hits the 30-degrees Celsius mark.