Futurism

Rule Breakers Tired of those pesky subscriptions that make it impossible to cancel them? That practice may become illegal and punishable by law, thanks to a new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) rule proposal that just dropped. In a press release, the FTC said that its new "click to cancel" rule will require sellers to "make […]

I Heart New York New Yorkers aren't exactly known for being warm and fuzzy, which was why it was so shocking that only a few were rude to some trash robots deployed in Greenwich Village. The Cornell researchers behind the experiment — which, we should note, featured robotic trash cans that zoomed about Astor Place […]

Anecdotal accounts were already abound of people losing money to scammers cloning the voices of their relatives. Now, it's apparently become enough of a prevalent — and serious — issue that federal regulators are stepping in. On Monday, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published a consumer alert on emerging voice cloning scams, warning people […]

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory has spotted an absolutely towering tornado roaring on the surface of the sun, raging with swirls of plasma to such astounding heights that even our entire planet would be consumed in its destructive throes. Astronomers at the observatory had been tracking the "solar tornado" since March 14, until it finally spun […]

In more terrible news from the nanoplastics front: a recent study from researchers at the Netherlands' Leiden University has confirmed that tiny plastics cause absolutely horrid development problems in forming chicken embryos, leading to extensive malformations and birth defects in newborn chicks. "Polystyrene nanoplastics cause a wide spectrum of severe congenital malformations in the chick […]

Profit, Shmofit With the help of a brand-new $150 million dollar cash infusion from Andreessen Horowitz, a 16-month-old AI chatbot startup called Character.ai just reached a $1 billion market cap — despite having yet to generate any revenue. Founded by two ex-Googlers, the app is pretty much exactly what it says it is. Character.ai's platform […]

Tea's Hot Like everyone else in his industry, SpaceX, Tesla, and Twitter CEO Elon Musk has had a lot to say about OpenAI in recent weeks — as he probably should, considering that he was one of the firm's original founders, launching the formerly non-profit company back in 2015 alongside figures like Reid Hoffman, Ilya […]

Humans On Top Jaron Lanier is one of the foremost pioneers of VR technology — but he's also notorious for being one of Silicon Valley's harshest critics. Yet, he balances these bitings critiques with his own brand of laid-back, "dismal optimism,"  and he's recently shared his thoughts on the tech industry's latest obsession: AI. In […]

Music production is one of the creative tasks that has been democratized by the rise of consumer technology. Tasks like editing and adding effects to multitrack recordings once required a room’s worth of equipment, but can now be done from an airplane seat by someone with a laptop and headphones. Don’t get us wrong, the […]

Set For Sea Infamous Harvard physicist Avi Loeb hasn't given up on his quest to recover what he believes could be a potential alien artifact at the bottom of the Pacific. In fact, based on a recent update, he and his team are closer than ever to finally getting their highly scrutinized, $1.5 million Galileo […]