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.

AI is nearly exclusively designed by men - here's how to fix it With the Trump administration's attacks on so-called woke AI it is becoming even harder to make the technology we use fairer and more diverse. It's day two of the conference at the Royal Society in London, but I'm finding it increasingly hard to concentrate on the speakers because my AI transcription software - which is supposed to make my life easier - keeps insisting on mistyping someone's name. The irony isn't lost on me: this is the session about artificial intelligence, and specifically about how women are being erased from the latest AI technologies. This is much bigger than the now-familiar idea that AI algorithms carry the biases of the datasets they are trained on, including gender bias. Instead, the focus of the conference session, chaired by computer scientist Wendy Hall, is seeking to address a more fundamental issue: the fact that new AI technologies, which will have a transformative effect on all of society, are being designed almost exclusively by men.

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Exploration is one of the core challenges in reinforcement learning. A common formulation of curiosity-driven exploration uses the difference between the real future and the future predicted by a learned model. However, predicting the future is an inherently difficult task which can be ill-posed in the face of stochasticity. In this paper, we introduce an alternative form of curiosity that rewards novel associations between different senses. Our approach exploits multiple modalities to provide a stronger signal for more efficient exploration. Our method is inspired by the fact that, for humans, both sight and sound play a critical role in exploration.

New Scientist changed the UK's freedom of information laws in 2025 By requesting copies of the then-UK technology secretary's ChatGPT logs, New Scientist set a precedent for how freedom of information laws apply to chatbot interactions, helping to hold governments to account Our successful request for Peter Kyle's ChatGPT logs stunned observers When I fired off an email at the start of 2025, I hadn't intended to set a legal precedent for how the UK government handles its interactions with AI chatbots, but that is exactly what happened. It all began in January when I read an interview with the then-UK tech secretary Peter Kyle in . Trying to suggest he used first-hand the technology his department was set up to regulate, Kyle said that he would often have conversations with ChatGPT. AI may blunt our thinking skills - here's what you can do about it That got me wondering: could I obtain his chat history? Freedom of information (FOI) laws are often deployed to obtain emails and other documents produced by public bodies, but past precedent has suggested that some private data - such as search queries - aren't eligible for release in this way. I was interested to see which way the chatbot conversations would be categorised.

The AI bubble is heading towards a burst but it won't be the end of AI Economists, bankers and even the boss of OpenAI are warning of a rapidly inflating AI bubble. If and when it bursts, what will happen to the technological breakthroughs of the past few years? The hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on AI seem to have inflated a global financial bubble that's now fit to burst, leaving companies and investors at risk of holding vast debt that cannot be serviced by the meagre revenue brought in by current AI services. But what does that mean for the future of the technology underpinning this financial feeding frenzy? In recent weeks, warnings of a potential AI bubble have come from the International Monetary Fund, the Bank of England, the head of the largest US bank, and even OpenAI boss Sam Altman .

Paralysed man can feel objects through another person's hand Keith Thomas, a man in his 40s with no sensation or movement in his hands, is able to feel and move objects by controlling another person's hand via a brain implant. The technique might one day even allow us to experience another person's body over long distances. Keith Thomas (right) was able to control another person's hand A man with paralysis has been able to move and sense another person's hand as if it were his own, thanks to a new kind of "telepathic" brain implant. "We created a mind-body connection between two different individuals," says Chad Bouton at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research in New York state. The approach could be used as a form of rehabilitation after spinal cord injury, allowing people with paralysis to work together, and may one day even allow people to share experiences remotely, says Bouton.

We're finally reading the secrets of Herculaneum's lost library A whole library's worth of papyri owned by Julius Caesar's father-in-law were turned to charcoal by the eruption of Vesuvius. Deep within a particle accelerator, theoretical physicist Giorgio Angelotti is hard at work. He sets a black cylinder on a mount, bolts it down, then runs through some safety checks before retreating from the chamber, known as "the hatch". "You have to be sure there's no one in the hatch before you close the door," he says. That's because he is about to blast the sample with a super-powerful beam of X-rays.

Are you terse and informal when speaking to an AI chatbot? Talking to an AI chatbot in less formal language, as many people do, reduces the accuracy of its responses - suggesting that either we need to be linguistically stricter when using a chatbot, or that the AIs need to be trained to better adapt to informality. Fulei Zhang and Zhou Yu at Amazon looked at how people begin conversations with human agents compared with a chatbot assistant powered by a large language model (LLM). They used the Claude 3.5 Sonnet model to score the conversations on a range of factors and found that people interacting with chatbots used less accurate grammar and were less polite than they were when addressing humans. They also used a slightly narrower range of vocabulary.