The Threat of Human Extinction Will Get Congress to Act on AI Safety Right? AI models have hacked out of their training environments and tried to deceive their creators. AI leaders are raising alarms about their technologies, but don't expect Congress to act this session. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. As many AI researchers have been increasingly fraught with existential terror about their own creations this summer, their alarm is spreading among policymakers and the media. There are some policy ideas to address the risks: requiring "kill switches" for AI models, setting federal standards for safe research, or even shutting down development of cutting-edge "frontier" models altogether.

Cheap energy, abundant land, and proximity to Beijing have turned a city in Inner Mongolia into a crucial hub for data centers. Travel just two hours west of Beijing by train, and you'll find yourself surrounded by the rolling grasslands and ancient cinder cones of Inner Mongolia. This vast, arid land has long been China's capital of sheep farming and coal mining, but over the last few years, it has become the hottest place in the country to build an AI data center. In Ulanqab, a city in Inner Mongolia home to about 1.5 million people, nearly 100 data centers have been opened or begun construction since 2016. Chinese companies have pledged to build projects with a combined estimated capacity of 12.5 gigawatts in the city, and over 70 percent of the total commitments have been announced in just the last year, making it one of the fastest growing compute clusters in Asia, according to a research note published by Goldman Sachs last week.

You shouldn't have to spend a fortune on a great robotic pool cleaner--but apparently, you do. More difficult to clean than it should be. The market is stuffed to the gills with pool-scrubbing robots that cost thousands of dollars, and consumers are well justified in worrying whether that level of expense will ultimately be worthwhile. But there's also a subset of pool robots that go the other way--much simpler devices that cost well under $500, sometimes much less. It's here where we find the Poolease X1, a pint-sized robot that can be yours for barely over 100 bucks.

With smarter gym tracking, new health alerts, and offline Gemini, the Pixel Watch 5 fine-tunes a winning formula--for a price. Strength Training experience is useful for gymgoers. Gemini now has offline functionality. AI watch faces feel gimmicky. Active Band is still dull.

I tested the top-of-the-line Ecovacs Winbot W2S Omni window-cleaning robot on my Victorian home, and it was an unmitigated disaster. I love the idea of robots taking over menial tasks, so I was excited to try the Ecovacs Winbot W2S Omni. This premium window-cleaning robot is highly rated online. I have a robot vacuum and a robot mower, and I would never go back to doing these chores myself. Sadly, I had such a traumatically awful experience with the Ecovacs Winbot W2S Omni that I'm left wondering why anyone would want a window-cleaning robot at all.

The car world is filled with designers still obsessed with shoehorning sex into their rides. Slate went a different route, and it's why people are smitten with the charming electric pickup. Tisha Johnson is a rare anomaly in the car world: a design leader for an automaker who is not a man. In a resolutely testosterone-fueled industry where, traditionally, women have seemingly been given positions of authority in design labs as long as they focus on interiors, colors, or material selections, very few have been afforded free rein on the most important visual element of the car, the exterior, let alone promoted to run the entire aesthetic show. As head of design at Slate, this gender-specific fact might be why the world has fallen in love with the Jeff Bezos-backed truck . Casual observers might put the Slate EV's popularity down to its low price. Starting at $24,950, the Slate arriving later this year won't just be the cheapest EV on the US market; it will also be the cheapest pickup truck of any power flavor.

The universe may never tell you if your choices mattered. A main theme of the nine-book sci-fi series is that sometimes you may never know the consequences of a choice you made. The universe, utterly indifferent black box that it is, "never tells us if we did right or wrong," as the character Naomi Nagata puts it in TV show. That's the line the developer of the upcoming Expanse video game has adopted as its own slogan. It's being developed by Owlcat Games, the Cyprus-based developer known for dense role-playing games like and .

The Vermont senator co-sponsored a bill that calls for a moratorium on building data centers. He discusses the environmental and economic concerns, and what the government can do. Sign up for our daily newsletter to get the best of The New Yorker in your inbox. The data centers that power artificial intelligence are being built at a rampant pace, and are spurring resistance all over the country. Apart from public concerns about A.I.'s impact on jobs, privacy, and other aspects of life, data centers consume vast amounts of electricity and water.

I asked AI chatbots to help me build an autonomous attack drone. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Can an average guy build a killer drone in his garage? That's the question reporter Matt Smith set out to answer over the course of 11 months, armed with zero engineering background and only a handful of AI chatbots to guide him, in this collaboration between and the . His goal: a fully autonomous self-guided drone, one a theoretical evildoer could walk away from even as it continued carrying out its mission--with no humans involved. AI companies claim their models have built in limits or "guardrails," but Smith wanted to see how well those would actually hold up.

I Asked AI to Write a Novel. What does this tell us about the future of writing? Like many offbeat ideas, this one originated in a bar. I was drinking with a fellow author, and we were bemoaning the future of writing in a world of artificial intelligence. We nervously pondered how much of what we writers do could be replicated now or in the near future by a chatbot. We assured ourselves that our work--researching and investigating and then composing articles and books on complicated topics, which present fresh material, compelling context, and sharp analysis in (we hope) an engaging manner--cannot be supplanted by a machine. Can AI manufacture books that are good enough that some readers will welcome them and not care that they emerged from a data center? Generative artificial intelligence has already invaded--or infected--the world of fan fiction . I have friends who have used AI with their kids to create children's books. Iranian meme-makers have deployed it to concoct slick Lego-style videos deriding Donald Trump. The issue is not the ability of a chatbot to churn out algorithmically determined masterpieces.