Like many others, I recently joined Bluesky. On Thanksgiving, I was delighted to see a private message from a fellow AI reporter, Will Knight from Wired. Or at least that's who I thought I was talking to. I became suspicious when the person claiming to be Knight said they were from Miami, when Knight is, in fact, from the UK. The account handle was almost identical to the real Will Knight's handle, and used his profile photo. Then more messages started to appear.

Watching the opening day of the US Senate hearings on AI brought to mind Marx's quip about history repeating itself, "the first time as tragedy, the second as farce". Some time ago we had the farce of the boss of Meta (neé Facebook) explaining to a senator that his company made money from advertising. This week we had the tragedy of seeing senators quizzing Sam Altman, the new acceptable face of the tech industry. Well, as one of my kids, looking up from revising O-level classics, once explained to me: "It's when you can see the disaster coming but you can't do anything to stop it." The trigger moment was when Altman declared: "We think that regulatory interventions by government will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models."

Matthias Marx says his face has been stolen. The German activist's visage is pale and wide, topped with messy, blond hair. So far, these features have been mapped and monetized by three companies without his permission. As has happened to billions of others, his face has been turned into a search term without his consent. In 2020 Marx read about Clearview AI, a company that says it has scraped billions of photos from the internet to create a huge database of faces. By uploading a single photo, Clearview's clients, which include law enforcement agencies, can use the company's facial recognition technology to unearth other online photos featuring the same face.

For many years, researchers knew that rodents' squeaks tell a lot about how the animals are feeling. Much like a wagging tail on a dog, certain vocalizations indicate the rodents are happy. Conversely, other vocalizations indicate the rodents are stressed, or even depressed. But why were they interested in the rodents' moods? These researchers wanted to understand the rodents' responses to various stimuli.

It may be simple, as News 19's Steve Johnson remarked to Dr. William Marx, the Vice President and Chief Technology office at Intuitive Research and Technology. "It is, well, it's more difficult than tic-tac-toe, but it's easy enough that people can understand it when we wrap artificial intelligence around it," Marx explained. After playing the classic kids game, Steve and Marx moved to a computer version pitting two players together – both in the world of artificial intelligence. "This allows us to present artificial intelligence to people in a way they can hopefully understand, showing off algorithms, and search methods, pruning in trees, and all this kind of stuff difficult for people to grasp," Marx stated. "For instance, we're capturing every move made, the total number of moves evaluated. See how that number is going up? The artificial intelligence in the cloud is calculating all those possible moves for what's going on" It's what the artificial intelligence in the so-called cloud can do that's impressive: A massive network of computers working together to look for patterns, to calculate future moves, and to be predictive.

The data protection authority in Hamburg, Germany, for instance, last week issued a preliminary order saying New York-based Clearview must delete biometric data related to Matthias Marx, a 32-year-old doctoral student. The regulator ordered the company to delete biometric hashes, or bits of code, used to identify photos of Mr. Marx's face, and gave it till Feb. 12 to comply. Not all photos, however, are considered sensitive biometric data under the European Union's 2018 General Data Protection Regulation. The action in Germany is only one of many investigations, lawsuits and regulatory reprimands that Clearview is facing in jurisdictions around the world. On Wednesday, Canadian privacy authorities called the company's practices a form of "mass identification and surveillance" that violated the country's privacy laws.

Will AI take away our jobs? Will AI destroy the world and/or become our ruler? I argue it is great to think and ask this kind of question and they should not be taken as pessimistic thinking. The goal of these questions is not to know the right answer, the goal is to understand different visions of the future, or at least how our experts are thinking about this important question. But before asking or thinking about these important questions let us think about something more basic, the relation between economic growth and innovation.

Hardly a week goes by without a report announcing the end of work as we know it. In 2013, Oxford University academics Carl Frey and Michael Osborne were the first to capture this anxiety in a paper titled: "The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?". They concluded 47% of US jobs were threatened by automation. Since then, Frey has taken multiple opportunities to repeat his predictions of major labour market disruptions due to automation. In the face of threats to employment, some progressive thinkers advocate jettisoning our work ethic and building a world without work.

November 8 is National STEM Day, a day celebrating science, technology, engineering, and math. The STEM field of 20 years ago looks very different than the one of today and will look very different in even just five years. Inspired by the air shows he saw growing up, Bill Marx went into the aerospace field in the mid-90s. Now, he is the chief technology officer at Intuitive Research and Technology Corporation. "A lot of the stuff you used to use a supercomputer for 30 years ago," Marx said.

In 1899, French artist Jean-Marc Côté was among a team of illustrators commissioned to create a series of drawings to commemorate the 1900 world's fair in Paris. The series, originally printed as inserts for cigar boxes (and then later reprinted, but never sold, as postcards - science fiction author Isaac Asimov reportedly owned the only surviving set) took the artists' best guess at how technology would change our lives by the advent of the 21st century. The subject matter of En L'An 2000 is, for the most part, spectacularly off the mark. Firefighters battle flames while flying through the air on bat wings, deep sea divers ride giant seahorses through the ocean and students have the contents of history books transferred directly into their brains via psychic helmets. Endearingly hopeful and bizarre, Côté and his fellow artists' work does betray just how hard it is to predict where the next wave of technological developments will take us.