Steve Rose goes for a spin. Steve Rose goes for a spin. 'We don't tell the car what it should do': my ride in a self-driving taxi Driverless'robotaxis' will be accepting fares in Britain's biggest city by the end of next year. Can they deal with London's medieval roads, hordes of pedestrians and errant ebikers? 'I'm really excited to show you this," says Alex Kendall, the CEO of Wayve, as he gets behind the wheel of one of the company's electric Ford Mustangs. The car pulls up to a junction at a busy road in King's Cross, London, all by itself. "You can see that it's going to control the speed, steering, brake, indicators," he says to me - I'm in the passenger seat. "It's making decisions as it goes.

An engineer at the AgiBot factory in Shanghai, China, where the 5,000th mass-produced humanoid robot had rolled off the production line. An engineer at the AgiBot factory in Shanghai, China, where the 5,000th mass-produced humanoid robot had rolled off the production line. How close are we to the sci-fi vision of autonomous humanoid robots? C hen Liang, the founder of Guchi Robotics, an automation company headquartered in Shanghai, is a tall, heavy-set man in his mid-40s with square-rimmed glasses. His everyday manner is calm and understated, but when he is in his element - up close with the technology he builds, or in business meetings discussing the imminent replacement of human workers by robots - he wears an exuberant smile that brings to mind an intern on his first day at his dream job. Guchi makes the machines that install wheels, dashboards and windows for many of the top Chinese car brands, including BYD and Nio. He took the name from the Chinese word, "steadfast intelligence", though the fact that it sounded like an Italian luxury brand was not entirely unwelcome. For the better part of two decades, Chen has tried to solve what, to him, is an engineering problem: how to eliminate - or, in his view, liberate - as many workers in car factories as technologically possible. Late last year, I visited him at Guchi headquarters on the western outskirts of Shanghai. Next to the head office are several warehouses where Guchi's engineers tinker with robots to fit the specifications of their customers. Chen, an engineer by training, founded Guchi in 2019 with the aim of tackling the hardest automation task in the car factory: "final assembly", the last leg of production, when all the composite pieces - the dashboard, windows, wheels and seat cushions - come together. At present, his robots can mount wheels, dashboards and windows on to a car without any human intervention, but 80% of the final assembly, he estimates, has yet to be automated. That is what Chen has set his sights on. As in much of the world, AI has become part of everyday life in China . But what most excites Chinese politicians and industrialists are the strides being made in the field of robotics, which, when combined with advances in AI, could revolutionise the world of work.

'Making people feel powerful' All Will Rise. 'Making people feel powerful' All Will Rise. Why an up-and-coming indie developer is returning Microsoft's money Don't get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? V ideo games are in a funding crisis. Investor money flowed freely during the pandemic gaming boom, but now the well has run dry.

Graves being prepared for the victims of an airstrike on a school in Minab in southern Iran, 2 March 2026. Graves being prepared for the victims of an airstrike on a school in Minab in southern Iran, 2 March 2026. A photo of Iran's bombed schoolgirl graveyard went around the world. T he graves, freshly dug, lie in neat rows of 20 across. More than 60 have already been carved out of the earth, with a few clusters of people standing gathered around them.

In 2025, when Elon Musk joined the government as the de facto head of something called the "department of government efficiency", he declared that governments were poorly configured "big dumb machines". To the senator Ted Cruz, he explained that "the only way to reconcile the databases and get rid of waste and fraud is to actually look at the computers". Muskism came to Washington soaked in memes, adolescent boasts and sadistic victory dances over mass firings. Leading a team of teenage coders and mid-level managers drawn from his suite of companies, Musk aimed to enter the codebase and rewrite regulations and budget lines from within. He would drag the paper-pushing bureaucracy kicking and screaming into the digital 21st century, scanning the contents of cavernous rooms of filing cabinets and feeding the data into a single interoperable system. The undertaking combined features of private equity-led restructuring with startup management, shot through with the sensibility of gaming and rightwing culture war. To succeed, he would need "God mode", an overview of the whole. If the mandate of Doge was to "[modernise] federal technology and software to maximise governmental efficiency and productivity", in the words of the executive order that launched the initiative on 20 January 2025, the reality was a strengthening of the state's surveillance capacities. Over time, Musk had become convinced that the real bugs in the code were people, especially the non-white illegal immigrants whom he saw as pawns in a liberal scheme to corrupt democracy and beneficiaries of what he called "suicidal empathy". He understood empathy itself in coding terms.

'As soon as we got Pong to work, people said: 'When are you going to do Doom?' a biological computer playing the 90s video game. 'As soon as we got Pong to work, people said: 'When are you going to do Doom?' a biological computer playing the 90s video game. A petri dish of human brain cells is currently playing Doom. Scientists in the US have uploaded a fruit fly to a computer simulation, while an Australian lab has taught neurons on a glass chip to play a 90s video game. How long before we are all living in a sci-fi movie? I t sounds like the opening of a sci-fi film, but US scientists recently uploaded a copy of the brain of a living fly into a simulation.

Subhalata Pradhan, a Gram Vikas fieldworker, talks to Raja Pradhan about the chatbot and addresses concerns over sharing his details. Subhalata Pradhan, a Gram Vikas fieldworker, talks to Raja Pradhan about the chatbot and addresses concerns over sharing his details. India's scattered workforce: the chatbot keeping families in touch during emergencies Covid exposed the lack of data on the country's 140 million mobile migrant workers, but a new project in Odisha is helping to fill in the gaps Mon 16 Mar 2026 02.00 EDTLast modified on Mon 16 Mar 2026 02.03 EDT Raja Pradhan is sitting cross-legged, scrolling on his phone in his village in eastern India when a green WhatsApp chat bubble pops up on the screen. Are you going outside for work? He reads the message twice, unsure whether to respond.

We can't let them hide behind their models From Gaza to Iran, the pattern is the same: precision weapons, chosen blindness, and dead children. There is an Israeli military strategy called the "fog procedure". First used during the second intifada, it's an unofficial rule that requires soldiers guarding military posts in conditions of low visibility to shoot bursts of gunfire into the darkness, on the theory that an invisible threat might be lurking. It's violence licensed by blindness. Shoot into the darkness and call it deterrence. With the dawn of AI warfare, that same logic of chosen blindness has been refined, systematized, and handed off to a machine.

'I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff': professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI Lea Pao, a professor of literature at Stanford University, has been experimenting with ways to get her students to learn offline. She has them memorize poems, perform at recitation events, look at art in the real world. It's an effort to reconnect them to the bodily experience of learning, she said, and to keep them from turning to artificial intelligence to do the work for them. "There's no AI-proof anything," Pao said. "Rather than policing it, I hope that their overall experiences in this class will show them that there's a way out."

It generally takes 18 to 36 months to build a hyperscale AI site - such as, presumably, one of the world's most powerful supercomputers. It generally takes 18 to 36 months to build a hyperscale AI site - such as, presumably, one of the world's most powerful supercomputers. From press release to scrap metal site: the Essex'supercomputer' that's still a scaffolding yard Nscale's AI project still in use as depot ahead of pledged completion date - with planning permission filed after Guardian's inquiries Revealed: UK's multibillion AI drive is built on'phantom investments' T he press releases announcing a gleaming supercomputer on the outskirts of north London depict a glass and concrete building, rising from a tree-lined street. Accompanied by images of glowing blue robot faces, it looks like the centre of a technological revolution. By the end of this year, that artist's impression is supposed to be a reality.