Today, a group of senators introduced the NO FAKES Act, a law that would make it illegal to create digital recreations of a person's voice or likeness without that individual's consent. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), fully titled the Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act of 2024. If it passes, the NO FAKES Act would create an option for people to seek damages when their voice, face or body are recreated by AI. Both individuals and companies would be held liable for producing, hosting or sharing unauthorized digital replicas, including ones made by generative AI. We've already seen many instances of celebrities finding their imitations of themselves out in the world.

For the past 10 years, Sonia Grego has been thinking about toilets – and more specifically what we deposit into them. "We are laser-focused on the analysis of stool," says the Duke University research professor, with all the unselfconsciousness of someone used to talking about bodily functions. "We think there is an incredible untapped opportunity for health data. And this information is not tapped because of the universal aversion to having anything to do with your stool." As the co-founder of Coprata, Grego is working on a toilet that uses sensors and artificial intelligence to analyse waste; she hopes to have an early model for a pilot study ready within nine months.

Automation has made it much easier for businesses to operate, especially by taking over repetitive, menial tasks. But as new advances are going live, the threat of automation to the job market seems like it might be a reality. Whether for good or ill, automation is currently an established part of business operations. As they become more sophisticated, automation systems combined with other new technology such as artificial intelligence and internet of things could signal a massive shift in how employees see their jobs and their responsibilities. Below, 15 professionals from Forbes Coaches Council share their predictions about what automation will do to the job market as it continues to reach new industries.

A Portland woman recently told a local news outlet that her Amazon Echo device had gone rogue, sending a recording of a private conversation to a random person in her contact list. On Thursday, two senators tasked with investigating consumer privacy sent a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos demanding answers. In the letter, Republican senator Jeff Flake and Democratic senator Chris Coons, who serve respectively as chairman and ranking member of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, ask Bezos to explain how exactly the Amazon Echo device listens to and stores users' voices. The senators also seek answers about what the company is doing to protect users from having that sensitive information misused. The letter, which was reviewed by WIRED, comes in the midst of what Flake calls a "post-Facebook" world, referring to the data privacy scandal in which Facebook says the data of as many as 87 million Americans may have been misappropriated by a political consulting firm called Cambridge Analytica.

Large-scale Hollywood films employ a wide range of consultants, from ER doctors to military experts to veteran constitutional lawyers. Rare is the big-budget adventure, however, that retains a linguist specializing in syntax, morphology, ergativity and nominalization. As moviegoers have turned out to see "Arrival" -- Denis Villeneuve's cerebral alien-invader adventure has grossed $50 million in two weeks of release -- many have been struck by the language symbols at its center. Those ornate, hollowed-out inkblots -- like Rorschach tests by way of "E.T." -- have distinguished the film from many science-fiction movies that came before. Very few nonhuman languages have ever been shown on screen in their written form -- let alone been made the center of sophisticated in-movie linguistic study.

In the sci-fi film Arrival, alien spaceships suddenly appear above twelve locations on Earth. The aliens--seven-limbed creatures called heptapods--are willing to let a few humans come aboard for quick chats, but there's no universal translator gizmo to help the two species parley. Instead, each country calls upon its top linguists, including Louise Banks, played by Amy Adams. Banks is whisked away to the nearest spaceship in Montana, tasked with untangling the heptapods' languages and figuring out why they have come to Earth. To find out how linguists might react when faced with an extraterrestrial language, the filmmakers consulted Jessica Coon, a professor of linguistics at McGill University in Montreal.

Earlier this year, when Amy Adams was in Montreal working on the sci-fi movie, Arrival, out today, she hung out with linguist Jessica Coon. In the film, Adams plays a linguist tasked by the United States government with deciphering a visiting aliens' language. The film's producers tapped Coon, an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics at McGill University, as a scientific advisor because she specializes in studying languages spoken by relatively few people, notably Mayan tongues in Central America. Coon says chatting about her work--analyzing the structure of rare languages, working in the field--with Adams is probably the "most glamorous thing" she will ever do in her academic life. For Coon there's a sense of urgency in her work, since many obscure languages are fast going extinct. She thinks that if linguists don't analyze the rarer languages of the world's 6,000 while they still can, they won't be able to understand the nature of human language; what linguists do understand, she says, is derived from the accessible languages of Western Europe.