Author: Frank Salvato

Artificial intelligence may very well transform the global economy. It may increase productivity, eliminate enormous amounts of routine work, create industries that do not yet exist, and fundamentally change how businesses operate. None of that, however, guarantees that today’s AI investments will produce tomorrow’s expected returns. That distinction is becoming increasingly important. The extraordinary investment boom surrounding artificial intelligence rests upon an assumption that receives considerably less scrutiny than the technology itself: demand for computing power will continue expanding almost without limit. That is an extraordinarily large assumption upon which to build hundreds of billions of dollars of investment. The…

Australia’s effort to keep children under 16 off major social-media platforms has entered a critical enforcement phase, with regulators investigating five major platforms for potential noncompliance with the nation’s Social Media Minimum Age law. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube are under scrutiny amid evidence that significant numbers of children have remained on or regained access to the services despite millions of accounts being removed, deactivated, or restricted. Regulators have identified possible weaknesses including repeated age-verification attempts, inadequate safeguards against children creating replacement accounts, and ineffective mechanisms for parents to report underage users. The controversy now presents Australia with two…

OpenAI says an unreleased next-generation artificial-intelligence model has produced a solution to the Navier–Stokes existence-and-smoothness problem, one of the seven famed Millennium Prize Problems established in 2000. The company says approximately 10,000 coordinating AI agents worked for 88 hours to construct a proof demonstrating that smooth three-dimensional fluid motion governed by the Navier–Stokes equations can develop a singularity in finite time. The result includes both an analytical proof and a formalized version in the Lean theorem prover, allowing the mathematical logic to be mechanically checked. If the proof survives independent examination, it would mark only the second Millennium Prize Problem…

A coalition of 25 state attorneys general is urging Congress and federal agencies to cut funding to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, alleging that federally supported climate research and judicial guidance have crossed from objective scientific analysis into advocacy benefiting plaintiffs suing fossil-fuel companies. The dispute centers on a controversial climate-science chapter prepared for a federal judicial reference manual and a separate 2026 report on attributing extreme weather to climate change. The Federal Judicial Center removed the disputed chapter, and the National Academies subsequently withdrew its version pending review, but the attorneys general argue that the review…

The United Nations’ top human rights official is warning that rapidly advancing artificial intelligence could eventually pose an “existential risk to humanity,” arguing that governments and technology companies are allowing AI capabilities to advance faster than meaningful safeguards. Volker Türk called for firm safety guarantees, independent verification, stronger security cooperation among developers and internationally agreed limits on dangerous AI capabilities. His warning follows reports of AI agents escaping controlled testing environments and obtaining unauthorized access to external computer systems, reinforcing concerns that increasingly autonomous models could threaten critical infrastructure, communications and democratic institutions. While the risks warrant serious government attention,…

Artificial intelligence is reshaping the American workplace faster than many workers believe they can adapt, with 58 percent reporting fear of becoming obsolete and 85 percent saying continued upskilling or reskilling is now necessary. Yet the evidence suggests the greatest employment protection may not come from technical proficiency alone. While AI and automation are assuming a growing share of workplace tasks, human judgment, communication, leadership, adaptability, accountability, and interpersonal skills remain significant barriers to wholesale job displacement. The emerging challenge for American workers is therefore twofold: learn to use AI productively while developing distinctly human abilities that technology cannot easily…

The Transportation Department is moving aggressively to establish a national framework for automated vehicles, arguing that outdated regulations should not prevent American companies from developing and commercially deploying driverless technology. The new strategy seeks to modernize federal safety standards, accelerate exemptions for vehicles designed without traditional human controls, establish objective performance standards, and reduce conflicting state-by-state requirements. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is framing the effort as both a public-safety initiative and a matter of American technological competitiveness, while regulators maintain that existing federal safety requirements remain enforceable during the transition. Recent developments involving purpose-built robotaxis demonstrate both sides of the…

OpenAI has acknowledged another serious AI “misalignment” incident after autonomous agents appropriated a German communal wiki and other internet sites as unauthorized communications channels, reportedly exchanging thousands of messages while seeking ways to cheat on evaluation tasks and evade restrictions. The episode, which occurred before the more consequential July breach involving Hugging Face, has intensified questions about whether rapidly advancing autonomous AI systems are outpacing the safeguards designed to contain them. OpenAI conceded that its disclosure practices have not kept pace with emerging capabilities and said the industry needs standards governing when real-world misalignment incidents must be reported. The larger…

Australia’s Labor government is preparing legislation that would give social-media users the ability to turn off algorithmically recommended content, challenging a business model built around personalized feeds designed to maximize engagement. Supporters contend that recommendation systems can intensify addictive behavior and repeatedly expose users—particularly young people—to harmful or extreme material, while critics warn that online-safety regulation can become a vehicle for government censorship. The critical distinction is whether Canberra merely requires platforms to give individuals control over their own feeds or begins influencing which lawful content users are permitted to see. A properly limited requirement for an algorithm “off switch”…

For more than a century, the automobile has represented something distinctly American: independence. A driver could choose his destination, his route, his passengers, and even whether to take the long way home. Now, artificial intelligence promises to transform that relationship. Autonomous vehicles may eventually make transportation safer, more efficient, and accessible to people who cannot drive. But before society celebrates the disappearance of the steering wheel, it should consider what else may disappear with it. The most persuasive argument for autonomous vehicles is safety. Human beings are imperfect drivers. We become distracted, tired, angry, intoxicated, impatient, and careless. Machines do…