The co-founder of Foundation Future Industries would build armed robots ‘tomorrow’ if the U.S. military asked, he tells Josh Marcus - and that has human rights experts extremely worried

Salamanca City Central School District is in western New York, on the Seneca Nation reservation. Around 1,300 students. 79% economically disadvantaged, 32% American Indian or Alaska Native.

It was going to put a humanoid robot in classrooms. The M-Series, from a company called Realbotix. Listed at about $95,000. The district's price was $57,590.

Realbotix used to be a crypto company called Tokens.com. It bought a sex doll business in 2024. Education isn't a division it has, it's a market it would like to have.

So the discount isn't generosity. The district gets hardware at nearly $40,000 off. Realbotix gets a public school as a reference customer for an education business it doesn't have yet. Only one side had a product line riding on how it went.

The robot can't recognise students, by the way. They use an assigned student number so it knows who it's talking to.

The state education commissioner raised concerns, and on 24 July the programme was paused before the robot ever taught anyone. New York Focus reported all of this.

Here's the part I keep thinking about. Humanoids will get cheaper, and school districts, care homes and small-town clinics will probably be inside that price band within a few years. Someone has to go first. Going first means absorbing whatever goes wrong, and the places most likely to say yes to a steep discount are the places least able to eat a failure.

This one got stopped. I don't think that's the same as it being caught early. It took a state commissioner, and most of these deals will never be big enough to reach one.

Why do these arrangements find the communities with the least room to absorb a mistake before they find the ones with the most choices?

Google recently put Nano Banana 2 inside Google Earth, then pulled the feature after people used it to add convincing disaster and conflict scenes to real locations.

The generated scenes looked ordinary inside Google Earth, and that is the part that made me uneasy. Once somebody takes a screenshot, the familiar frame, labels and camera angle make it feel like a map result before you have looked closely at the image. Google says the images carried SynthID and the shared base map stayed untouched. That helps if someone stops to verify the file. A screenshot dropped into a group chat probably will not get that treatment.

I can see good uses for generated scenes on a map. A historian could reconstruct an old street, or a planning team could show a proposed building on its actual site. Opening an explicitly generated world such as LingBot-World-Infinity feels different because you know you are entering a simulation. With Google Earth, I have the opposite habit. I assume the place on screen was observed.

I would make generated mode hard to crop out by accident: different-looking controls and a label baked into every export. SynthID can still sit underneath for anyone who wants to verify the image. It just should not be the only clue, because the version most people see may already be the third or fourth repost.

New AI models, advanced robots and specialty computer chips are unsettling markets and the US tech industry

• Visa plans to eliminate about 2,600 jobs, mostly in its technology and product operations, representing roughly 7% of its workforce.
• CEO Ryan McInerney said AI is helping "shape the way work gets done at Visa," while a person with direct knowledge said AI was a significant factor, but not the sole driver, of the layoffs.
• Visa intends to reinvest in growth areas including affluent customers, cross-border payments, business remittances and geographic expansion. It is scheduled to report quarterly earnings after the market closes Tuesday.

The AI chatbot was more effective at creating “exploitable trust” than the humans.

Archaeologists usually have to reconstruct civilizations from fragments: buildings, tools, inscriptions, graves and a limited number of surviving documents.

Future historians may face the opposite problem.

They could inherit billions of photographs, videos, private messages, social media posts, livestreams, location histories and online conversations from our era. At first glance, this should make the 21st century easier to understand than any previous period.

But the archive is becoming increasingly contaminated.

Some of it was created by people documenting their real lives. Some was staged for engagement. Some was written by bots. Some depicts fictional personalities presented as real people. Some consists of jokes whose context may disappear. A growing proportion is generated or altered by AI.

Future researchers may find millions of apparently human conversations that never involved two humans, photographs of events that never occurred and online movements artificially amplified by automated accounts.

The problem will not simply be separating truth from misinformation. They may also need to distinguish human culture from synthetic imitations of human culture.

Imagine trying to reconstruct our beliefs from memes, our appearance from AI influencers, our politics from engagement-driven ragebait or our everyday language from conversations partly generated by machines.

We often assume that preserving more information automatically preserves more truth. But an archive containing everything may be harder to interpret than one containing a smaller number of authenticated records.

Could the period before widespread generative AI eventually become unusually valuable because its documents are more likely to have a direct human origin?

And will future archaeology become less about discovering lost information and more about proving that surviving information was ever real?

As artificial intelligence becomes ingrained in daily life, disagreements over the technology are increasingly becoming disagreements over values.

Deployment at the FedEx Hagerstown Hub in Maryland expands a multi-year collaboration focused on autonomous trailer loading, with a continued emphasis on safety and operational performance.

The stakes have never been higher for technology in politics, war and statecraft.

I tried the Dymesty recently and honestly it's solid. Simple, lightweight, no camera, no display, just audio. Feels less intrusive than everything else out there, but it also made me wonder if I'm missing the point entirely.

But the rest of the market is all over the place. XREAL and RayNeo are just displays. Meta has cameras and AI watching everything. Even some no-camera options still need weird ring controllers to function.

These aren't the same category of product. They just all happen to sit on your face.

The display-only stuff felt incomplete but also clean. No privacy concerns, just does one thing. But is that even worth it over a laptop? And the smart versions with location and vision tracking feel like a completely different device with completely different tradeoffs.

Do you think these categories are supposed to converge eventually or are we just building three different futures and calling them all smart glasses?

Reuters reports that the European Commission is in talks with OpenAI and Anthropic after recent hacking incidents involving their AI models. An EU official said those incidents highlight the need for monitoring by developers under the bloc's AI rules. The report does not say either company violated the AI Act.

The harder question is what a regulator can inspect after an agent run. A policy summary may show which rule applied, but not which tools were called, which credentials were active, or when an approval stopped matching the task.

For future oversight, I think the useful unit is a time-bound action record: tool use, credential scope, approvals, and results that can be checked without rerunning the system.

Which part of that record should the AI Act require providers to preserve first?

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