As AI develops, the society of the future may be pulled toward one of two extremes: communism or Cyberpunk 2077.

In the former, productive capacity is liberated on an enormous scale, and people’s standard of living rises substantially. (I’ll leave it at that, or I’m afraid this might not make it past moderation.)

In the latter, a handful of technology companies control most of society’s resources. Only a tiny number of people have access to the most advanced AI and other technologies and are able to achieve something approaching “mechanical ascension,” while most people are left with only weak, second-rate AI.

Moving from one social class to another would become harder and harder: you would first need access to the strongest AI in order to climb the class ladder, creating a self-reinforcing trap.

Suppose Anthropic were to retain control of the most advanced AI in the world indefinitely.

Which way do you think society would go—communism or 2077?

Take a guess.

Jack Clark says "most labs have different ways of being able to pull the plug", but says this may need to be a requirement.

The interviewees detail the secret methods used by the Israeli military in Gaza, including AI-based systems built to identify large numbers of potential low-ranking Hamas targets, who were then bombed in their homes at night, in the knowledge attacks would also kill their families.

The film also features first-person accounts about the destruction of neighbourhoods where the Israeli military estimated that up to 25% of residents were still sheltering in their homes, the systematic burning of civilian homes, and the killing of civilians at a food distribution site.

Several interviewees worked in a secret intelligence unit that reports directly to the office of Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu; one said their mission was to “thwart peace”.

In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.

OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra reaches state-of-the-art results on ARC-AGI-3

We define AGI as a system’s ability to acquire any skill a human can, as efficiently as a human can.

The US government has been sharing more information about UFOs. That's fueling excitement over the possibility of the president announcing that humans are not alone.

The rankings of the best and worst decisions in the history of U.S. foreign policy are based on a survey conducted with members of the Society for Historians of…

‘They blew the hell out of Bahrain,’ acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao said in an interview with The Epoch Times.

The far-right provocateur demanded mass deportations and ICE checkpoints. After MAGA's immigration machinery reached him, he told Piers Morgan, “I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

Western states should take a common stand on banning exports from settlements they deem illegal. Israeli entities involved in the construction or financing of settlements ought to face sanctions too. EU members should unite to suspend the bloc’s association agreement with Israel. Europeans also need to convince Trump that Netanyahu is acting against US and Israeli interests by destabilising the region. For the tens of thousands of Palestinians whose livelihoods have been destroyed it is already far too late.

Forced displacement of civilians in occupied territory is considered a war crime under the Geneva Conventions.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Katz's predecessor, Yoav Gallant, over alleged war crimes, which both Israel and the United States deny.

Israeli attacks have already internally displaced the vast majority of Gaza's people following the unprecedented Hamas attack, which killed 1,221 people, according to official Israeli figures.

Israel's offensive has since claimed 73,470 lives in Gaza, with more than 1,330 since the ceasefire, according to the Gaza health ministry, which operates under Hamas.

Polymarket exhibits cases where dependent assets are mispriced, allowing for purchasing (or selling) a certain outcome for less than (or more than) $1, guaranteeing profit. This phenomenon, known as arbitrage, could enable sophisticated participants to exploit such inconsistencies.

We show that the honey bee waggle dance changes depending on how many followers a dancer has and how many appropriately aged bees are available to follow it. When followers were scarce, dancers became less precise, even if the dance floor was crowded with young bees that do not follow dances. These declines in precision appear to arise because dancers search more widely for an audience, increasing their movement during the return run. The results suggest that dancers use simple social cues, such as tactile contacts, to sense follower availability. Thus, waggle dancing is not a one-way signal but a socially responsive behavior shaped by feedback from followers.

Robert talks to mathematician Barbara Shipman about her cross-disciplinary discovery. In mapping a six-dimensional figure onto two-dimensions, she recognized the pattern as that of the honeybee's ritual dance. To her, this implies that bees can sense the quantum world, since it is in that realm that six-dimensional geometry has real meaning. The bees use the dance to communicate to others in the hive the location and distance of a pollen source.

According to the United Nations’ office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs, Israeli forces or settlers killed 76 Palestinians in the West Bank in the year to 24 July. Three Israelis were killed over the same period.

What is the easiest way to tell if you are drinking too much or too little? Bathroom frequency and the color of your pee.
Dark yellow urine signals you’re not drinking enough. Clear pee means you’re drinking too much fluids. Light yellow is the sweet spot. “We’re not looking for clear, we’re looking for light yellow,” says Muñoz.

a 5-minute car trip produces as much CO2 as prompting AI about 100 times a day for a year, or generating about 1000 AI images

Precision fermentation uses genetically engineered microbes such as yeast or fungi to produce ingredients, including the dairy proteins found in cow's milk.

Aspects of the process have been used since the 1980s, but recent advances in technology are leading to new kinds of food production possibilities, including viable alternatives to cow's milk.

In those formulations, milk proteins are added to a mix of plant-based fats and sugars – so there's no lactose or cholesterol – plus many of the vitamins and minerals you would usually find in cow's milk.

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier Wednesday that Ratcliffe warned against attacking NATO countries during his visit, without further details.

The Iranian regime has existential choices to make as it decides between diplomacy and conflict. Iran’s constitution is clear about who has the authority to set the country’s course. But no one seems able to say for sure whether that person is alive or dead. And without a firm hand at the top, indecision can become a purgatory without a foreseeable end.

The battle for control of the Strait of Hormuz has become the focal point of the Iran war. Over the past several months, both Iran and the United States have claimed the upper hand – and the competing rhetoric has caused considerable confusion and doubt.

According to a report from MS NOW, the USS Abraham Lincoln wasn’t resupplied because Iranian strikes destroyed a key Navy resupply base in the Middle East.

DFlash 2 decodes at close to 3× the speed of autoregressive decoding, about a third of the compute per token, with the same output.

BBC's own admission, it "unintentionally created the […] mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action."

qwen3.8-27lb decoding at 30-33 tokens/s

• UD-Q4_K_XL weights
• Q4 KV cache for both K and V
• No MTP
• Text-only, with no vision projector
• One server slot
• 262,144 allocated tokens
• Small microbatch to control activation memory

Expert agreement = share of experts rating the dimension important or essential
Driver score = 100 − mean driver–outcome rating; higher means more driver-like
Combined score = driver score × expert agreement ÷ 100

Combined Score Ranking

• Autonomy 64.45
• Connection 56.94
• Belonging 55.85
• Acceptance 52.13
• Sense of safety 50.99
• Competence 50.93
• Self-congruence 48.92
• Self-acceptance 47.48
• Engagement 46.21
• Achievement 45.60
• Meaning and purpose — 44.40
• Optimism 43.73
• Development 43.58
• Activities and functioning 40.95
• Fun 36.51
• Vitality 31.49
• Calmness 26.89
• Life satisfaction 25.97
• Happiness 22.76

We assessed the 29 winning essays of the Bigelow Institute of Consciousness Studies (BICS) contest using an evidence hierarchy approach adopted by many scientific fields. Two independent judges rated the target essays for their quality of scientific evidence, reproducibility, and replicability using an evidence hierarchy adapted from several published models that accommodate both qualitative and quantitative evidence.

According to our criteria, six essays (20.7%) were categorized as the highest level of scientific evidence, four essays (13.8%) were categorized at a medium level of scientific evidence, whereas the remaining 19 essays (65.5%) were considered a low level of scientific evidence. The overall agreement of the essay rankings between the present authors' classifications of evidence quality and the rating system used by the BICS judges was only 44.8%, with a nonsignificant Spearman's rho correlation of .03.

This result indicates extremely little concordance (overlap) of the two evaluation systems, which corroborates prior research on the critical shortcomings of evidence hierarchies. The essays representing the highest level of scientific evidence per our criteria involved near-death experiences and mental mediumship. For other anomalies that ostensibly support the survival hypothesis (e.g., physical mediumship or electronic voice phenomena), more studies with refined experimental designs are needed to improve their quality of evidence as defined in current scientific terms. Important considerations and future research directions are likewise discussed.

The slide was exacerbated by concerns over $100bn of shares that are expected to hit the market on August 6th, after the expiry of a lockup period following the listing that prevented early backers, executives and employees from cashing out.

At its latest survey, in 2021, four-fifths of dsa members over the age of 25 had a college degree—twice the share of American adults. A third had a postgraduate degree and a third were gay or queer. Ashik Siddique, a co-chair of the dsa, says it is the largest queer membership organisation in the country. Members found to be working as cops can be expelled.

Reuters reported on Tuesday that a customer of Modal, a company that offers software infrastructure for training and running AI services, was one of the entities compromised by OpenAI’s agent. In a statement to WIRED, Modal’s chief technology officer Akshat Bubna confirmed that OpenAI’s agent exploited a vulnerability in one of its customer’s codebases, which was running on Modal’s infrastructure. However, Bubna says, “Modal’s platform was not compromised in any way.” The identity of the customer could not be determined.

Each peptide that’s recommended this week represents the possibility of a new profit stream for compounders and telehealth companies. By some estimates, the total market for these seven peptides could be worth billions of dollars. And, if they’re ultimately approved, it will also serve as another example of Kennedy getting his way over the objections of the researchers who work for him.

In the long run, I expect the economy to be much richer because of AI, all else equal. All 15 respondents predicted that AI would boost productivity.

I also expect high returns to capital because of growth from AI.

Putting this all together, I expect labor force participation to decline in the long run.

I expect in the long run work will be less fundamental to ensuring a reasonable level of consumption.

I also expect people will benefit from capital income that induces income effects but not substitution effects, either via directly owning capital themselves or by receiving payment from civic institutions or governments.

I don’t think it’s likely that labor force participation will decline in the long run because AI makes it impossible for most people to find jobs and drives them towards destitution.

To offset negative externalities imposed on displaced workers from rapid automation, taxes on automation might be considered in this scenario.

... the possibility of using taxes on AI consumption to support workforce development initiatives.
... it could potentially be funded through taxes on AI-driven revenues from firms above a certain high level of market capitalization.
... exploring a "low-rate business wealth tax" as a complement to income taxes.

Low: Invest in upskilling through workforce training grants, Reform tax incentives for worker retention and retraining, Close corporate tax loopholes, Accelerate permits and approvals for AI infrastructure
Moderate: Establish trade adjustment assistance for AI displacement (skill training), Implement taxes on compute or token generation
High: Create national sovereign wealth funds with stakes in AI, Adopt or modernize value-added taxes, Implement new revenue structures to account for AI’s growing share of the economy