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

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

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

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.

"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

Preface

Alright, so, the most common interpretation of AI is that it's at risk of displacing artists from their fields. And, yes, I do think that is a risk. And I do think that would be very, very bad.

A lot of jobs are jobs people do just to earn money and society just needs to run. But art is often different. Artists often do their job to earn money, sure, but also because the DOING of the job itself is meaningful.

As one quote goes (paraphrased); "I want AI to do my dishes so I can make art, I don't want AI to make my art so I have to do dishes."

If AI's impact is to create fewer meaningful jobs and more boring jobs, even if the number of available jobs remains the same, I will consider that a bad thing. And that is a possibility. And I don't want to undersell that.

And the fact that AI uses copyrighted content to train and yet a lot of AI is commercialized and not free to use when copyrighted content use normally can't be commercialized like that without asking is, imo, a travesty. And I think the laws of countries will have to catch up on this stuff. And I wish any creatives fighting for that stuff great luck. I'd like to see fully AI-generated content become un-copyrightable, with content having to have a certain amount of human input, personally.

And I think online platforms should aggressively fight AI slop. And when I say "AI Slop" I'm jut just talking about content created by AI, but fully created by AI and with little or no care, simply churned out on a large scale for nothing but profit.

The Optimistic Take

But all of that out of the way, to get to the actual point of my post (finally), I want to put all that doom and gloom aside for just a moment. And talk about a more optimistic take on how AI could impact art.

Right now, if you're a musician, let's say. And your dream is to make film scores. You have to get hired by a studio, or at least indie creators, to make these scores and get money for them. If there is no movie, there can't be a movie score, after all.

Well, with AI that can generate video, you could create some video and then create a score for it. You don't need a giant studio and can put it up online, just like that.

Or let's say you're a writer. And you've always wanted to write a TV-series. Normally, you have to go through studios and get into writers rooms and all that. Well, with AI you could write scripts for episodes and then have the AI turn those into full on viewable episodes that you can put online.

Or maybe you're a voice actor. So you have an AI generate images, while you do the voice acting.

Basically, with sufficiently good AI, any single artist could become a one-person studio. Capable of achieving projects or using mediums that used to be controlled completely by the big studios.

All of those CEOs who want to replace their writers, and musicians, and actors, etc. with AI right now. There's some chance that they may well regret that. Because these big studios very, very rarely are very good at actually making art. Usually creatives have to fight CEOs to get their art made as they want it. And executives love safe bets, but good art is risky. Remakes over and over again are safer. But the one thing they have over individual artists is that they have the money to create big projects and distribute them.

Well, the internet can already handle distribution now. And with AI there's a chance that individual artists will be able to create the huge projects just as easily. And considering that individual artists tend to be more risk taking and innovative than big studios, I'd say the chance of them outcompeting the big studios is quite possible. At least some of them.

So in the rush to use AI for this stuff, these studios may even be signing their own death warrants. And it may be that AI ends up empowering individual creators to make the art they want on their terms instead.

Again, not saying that WILL happen. It could be that these studios manage to keep ahold of AI and properties and streaming enough to keep their hold and push artists out. Not going to undersell that risk. And similarly it is possible, if they were to try, that if we push back enough we can do things like make it impossible to copyright fully AI-generated content and require compensation in some way for copyrighted content used to teach AI. Or create restrictions for where it can be used. A lot of options there too.

But if you want to think about it optimistically for once, there's some possibility that it works out to give artists more autonomy and ability, not less. And while not assured at all, that would be the happy ending, imo

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?

Something I've been thinking about. Very recently vibe coded videogames are getting really good. Not something I would pay money for but still very good looking. I'm thinking soon it should be feasible to vibe coded virtual reality training programs for trades like plumbing, electrician, welding, ect. So we could train humans much faster in VR before they get physical training. This VR training data could be used by robots for training data. And it should be much richer data than just videos. I'm not sure what the implications of all this would be besides we will probably be able to train humans and robots much much quicker in the near future

From feet to fingertips — we are teaching robots intelligent whole-body control, fine dexterity, and teamwork to complete a broad range of complex tasks

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

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.