By focusing on the economic opportunities and economic data, fears about AI investment can turn into smart business decisions. There are many paths AI evolution could take. On one end of the spectrum, AI is dismissed as a marginal fad, another bubble fueled by notoriety and misallocated capital. On the other end, it's cast as a dystopian force, destined to eliminate jobs on a large scale and destabilize economies. Markets oscillate between skepticism and the fear of missing out, while the technology itself evolves quickly and investment dollars flow at a rate not seen in decades. All the while, many of today's financial and economic thought leaders hold to the consensus that the financial landscape will stay the same as it has been for the last several years.

This article explores the feasibility of creating an "electronic copy" of a deceased researcher by training artificial intelligence (AI) on the data stored in their personal computers. By analyzing typical data volumes on inherited researcher computers, including textual files such as articles, emails, and drafts, it is estimated that approximately one million words are available for AI training. This volume is sufficient for fine-tuning advanced pre-trained models like GPT-4 to replicate a researcher's writing style, domain expertise, and rhetorical voice with high fidelity. The study also discusses the potential enhancements from including non-textual data and file metadata to enrich the AI's representation of the researcher. Extensions of the concept include communication between living researchers and their electronic copies, collaboration among individual electronic copies, as well as the creation and interconnection of organizational electronic copies to optimize information access and strategic decision-making. Ethical considerations such as ownership and security of these electronic copies are highlighted as critical for responsible implementation. The findings suggest promising opportunities for AI-driven preservation and augmentation of intellectual legacy.

As scam compounds in Southeast Asia continue to drive massive campaigns targeting victims around the world, WIRED took a deeper look at how Elon Musk's satellite internet service provider Starlink is keeping many of those compounds in Myanmar online. Meanwhile, FTC complaints obtained by WIRED allege that an "OpenAI" job scam used Telegram to recruit workers in Bangladesh for months before the fraudsters suddenly disappeared. WIRED published the inside story of Russian tech executive Vladislav Klyushin, who--at Vladimir Putin's behest--was part of a notable US-Russia prisoner swap last summer after he was convicted and incarcerated in the US for insider trading that netted him 93 million. Earlier this week, TVs at the headquarters of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington, DC, showed an apparently AI-generated video on loop of Donald Trump kissing Elon Musk's feet. The words "LONG LIVE THE REAL KING" were superimposed over the video.

Nestled between an original Donkey Kong arcade machine, a mint condition OutRun racing simulation game and booths wired up with GameCubes and Nintendo 64s, the engineer Luke Malpass works away dismantling a broken Nintendo Wii. There has been a steady stream of people bringing in their old game consoles for repairs or modifications, on the house, to Four Quarters, a retro games arcade in Elephant and Castle, which has been transformed into a games clinic for two days. Gabriella Rosenau, 35, brought in her broken Wii that had been in the garage "for years". "I still play my brother's old Nintendo 64 and I love it, but I'd really love to get [the Wii] fixed." "I've done the odd bit of Call of Duty and the PlayStation stuff, but I have more of an interest in the retro games," she adds. Rosenau is part of a growing community who are ditching contemporary video games and picking up the consoles from their childhood, or even before their time.

"Jacob Javits of New York is the first United States senator to become fully automated," the Chicago Tribune announced in 1962 from the Republican state convention in Buffalo, where an electronic Javits spat out slips of paper with answers to questions about everything from Cuba's missiles ("a serious threat") to the Cubs' prospects (dim). Javits also harbors thoughts on medical care for the elderly, Berlin, the communist menace," and more than a hundred other subjects, the Tribune reported after an interview with the machine. Javits may have been the first automated American politician, but he wasn't the last. Since the nineteen-sixties, much of American public life has become automated, driven by computers and predictive algorithms that can do the political work of rallying support, running campaigns, communicating with constituents, and even crafting policy. In that same stretch of time, the proportion of Americans who say that they trust the U.S. government to do what is right ...

Tech history is filled with stories of companies that survived industry turbulence and came out stronger on the other side. There's also no shortage of companies that fizzled out spectacularly and became little more than footnotes. Such is the story of Tandy and its TRS-80 Pocket Computer. Sold exclusively through Radio Shack, the TRS-80 was part of a a new generation of tiny, lightweight personal computers you could take on the go. Sure, in 2024, we don't think twice about the personal computers (aka smartphones) we all carry everywhere, but in the early-1980s, these devices sounded like the future.

You might think your desktop computer is old, but that's nothing compared to these ancient relics. Two of the world's very first desktop computers have been discovered during a house clearance in London. The chance discovery revealed two of only three surviving Q1 computers anywhere in the world. Although it is often now overlooked, the Q1 paved the way for the computers we have today when it was launched more than 50 years ago. Brendan O'Shea, head of Just Clear which discovered the items, says: 'Never did I imagine that we'd find something so important to the field of technology and the history of computing.'

Forty years ago this week, on 22 January 1984, a stunning advertising video was screened during the Super Bowl broadcast in the US. It was directed by Ridley Scott and evoked the dystopian atmosphere of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Long lines of grey, shaven zombies march in lockstep through a tunnel into a giant amphitheatre, where they sit in rows gawping up at a screen on which an authoritarian figure is intoning a message. "Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the information purification directives," he drones. "We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology."

AMD always brings something interesting to CES -- hopefully CES 2024 is no different. It will feature AMD's chair and CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, and the company's senior vice president and GM of computing and graphics, Jack Huynh. Like many companies, AMD says its focus for the press conference on AI -- in this case, as it pertains to personal computers. The livestream's landing page says that "AMD is powering the end-to-end infrastructure that will define the AI era, from cloud installations to enterprise clusters, AI-enabled intelligent embedded devices and PCs." If all of that sounds very vague and boring, don't fret: While we don't know exactly what AMD plans to unveil at CES 2024, it's usually the time that the company unveils the CPUs and GPUs that will be in laptops through the coming year.

ACM A.M. Turing Award recipient Bob Metcalfe--engineer, entrepreneur, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin--is embarking on his sixth career, as a Computational Engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He is always willing to tell the story of his first career, as a researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) where, in 1973, Metcalfe and then-graduate student David Boggs invented Ethernet, a standard for connecting computers over short distances. In the ensuing years, thanks in no small part to Metcalfe's entrepreneurship and advocacy, Ethernet has become the industry standard for local area networks. Leah Hoffmann spoke to Metcalfe about the development of Ethernet and what it has meant for the future of connectivity. You published your first paper about Ethernet in Communications in July 1976 (https://bit.ly/403Sxmm).