A Roomba recorded a woman on the toilet. How did screenshots end up on Facebook? December 2022 In the fall of 2020, gig workers in Venezuela posted a series of images to online forums where they talk shop. The photos were mundane, if sometimes intimate, household scenes--including a particularly revealing shot of a young woman in a lavender T-shirt sitting on the toilet, her shorts pulled down to mid-thigh. The images were not taken by a person, but by development versions of iRobot's Roomba robot vacuum, a company now owned by Amazon.

"The original Wright flyer was not a useful airplane," said Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist at the University of Texas at Austin who reviewed Google's paper before publication. "But it was designed to prove a point. And it proved the point." A quantum machine, the result of more than a century's worth of research into a type of physics called quantum mechanics, operates in a completely different manner from regular computers. It relies on the mind-bending ways some objects act at the subatomic level or when exposed to extreme cold, like the metal chilled to nearly 460 degrees below zero inside Google's machine. One day, researchers believe, these devices could power advances in artificial intelligence or easily overwhelm the encryption that protects computers vital to national security.