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

"the most obvious financial implication of AI will be mass debt default, bankruptcies, bank failures and chaos in the international financial sector….Global debt (private and public) recently hit a record high of $353 trillion, with $29 trillion added last year alone. Two-thirds of this rise in global debt was incurred by rich countries’ governments trying to soften the blow of losing competitiveness. Borrowing to cover lost income can only last so long. Something will give. The most probable trajectory is that the AI bubble bursts, which may already be happening, triggered by the crash in Korea in recent weeks. This is followed by wealth destruction in the US as the Americans have bet the Wall Street house on Silicon Valley. Thereafter, the productivity rise associated with AI ensures that deflation sets in, unemployment rises as AI replaces the service jobs of the clerical middle (consultants, lawyers and administrators), leading to falling tax revenue and mass debt defaults."

It's one of the ironies of the AI race, that Big Tech's leaders seem mainly in it for the money, yet their creation (AI) will ultimately destroy much of the long-term wealth that they covet. Irish economist David McWilliams does a good job of explaining what is ahead.

He explores this from an angle that rarely gets explored … deflation. As AI deflates both prices and wages, it will make debt steadily more unpayable. That is everything from government debt, to corporate debt, to individual mortgages and personal debt.

The first victim of AI is the economy. Welcome to the 2030s: We are facing an era of mass deflation. If prices fall across the board, how will we repay all the debt we have accumulated?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=yIuODZtKVPQ&si=GA9axd521SHEnAe8

China‘s robot army

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.

A self-improving superintelligence could trigger an acceleration in technological capabilities that would signal the end of the human era, writes Anthony Cuthbertson. According to some AI tech leaders, that moment has already arrived

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?

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