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Trump Gives Elon Musk Access to All Unclassified Data in the US Government

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A new executive order appears to grant DOGE leader Elon Musk sweeping access to unclassified data held by US government agencies.

Bait and Switch

The fine print of a sweeping executive order seemingly grants Elon Musk — the wealthiest and arguably most powerful unelected figure in the world — and his associates at the somehow-still-real Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) access to all unclassified data held by US government agencies, according to Wired.

Since the evening of his inauguration, president Donald Trump has been busy signing a still-growing wave of sweeping executive actions. Among them was the establishment of the unfortunately-named DOGE, which per the order will be tasked with "modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity."

When DOGE was announced late last year, it was widely believed that the "department" would operate as a federal advisory committee, a type of consultative group subject to fairly strict transparency rules.

But as flagged by Wired, under the executive order, the Trump Administration didn't create a new federal advisory committee. It instead repurposed the United States Digital Service (USDS), an existing government organization with sweeping access to vast caches of data across government agencies, including the sensitive information of US citizens, as the "United States DOGE Service" — a move that seemingly opens the door for Musk and his operatives to access a massive amount of data without much transparency oversight.

"It's quite a clever way of integrating DOGE into the federal government that I think will work," George Washington University law professor Richard Pierce told Wired, "in the sense of giving it a platform for surveillance and recommendations."

Inside Out

A former USDS employee told Wired that the rebranding of the organization was an "A+ bureaucratic jiu-jitsu move" — and warned of dystopian, surveillance-driven outcomes that access to USDS-held data could foster.

"Is this technical talent going to be pointed toward using data from the federal government to track down opponents?" they told Wired. "To track down particular populations of interest to this administration for the purposes of either targeting them or singling them out or whatever it might end up being?" (That in mind: reporting from NextGov this week revealed that USDS workers are already being re-interviewed for their jobs, in part to gauge their perceived loyalty to the new president.)

As Wired notes, DOGE could still face some headaches regarding the complexities of inter-agency information sharing and the accessing of certain sensitive data, particularly in cases where department members lack certain clearances. Even so, according to experts, our federal government is wading into muddy, unknown waters.

"It could be a bipartisan effort to make government technology work better. It could be an oligarch extracting resources from the government," University of Michigan public policy Don Moynihan told Wired. "We just really don't know."

More on DOGE: DOGE.gov Website Launches With Mangled, AI-Generated American Flag

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There’s Apparently a Huge Financial Problem With Trump’s Massive AI Project

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President Donald Trump's behemoth $500 billion AI infrastructure project, dubbed Stargate, may be doomed from the start.

Trump made the sweeping announcement earlier this week, revealing that the ChatGPT maker, investment company SoftBank, tech giant Oracle, and Abu Dhabi state-run AI fund MGX would initially spend a total of $100 billion on the project, with the eventual goal of reaching half a trillion dollars in just a few years.

But in reality, according to the Financial Times' sources, Stargate may be facing insurmountable financial challenges as it attempts to get off the ground.

"They haven’t figured out the structure, they haven’t figured out the financing, they don’t have the money committed," an unnamed source told the newspaper.

Did Trump put the cart before the horse by making a splashy announcement before the pieces were in place? Critics of the project think it's entirely possible.

The FT's reporting is especially interesting considering this is exactly what multi-hyphenate Elon Musk, a personal enemy of Altman's, accused OpenAI of earlier this week.

"They don’t actually have the money," the mercurial CEO  tweeted just hours after the project was announced.

"SoftBank has well under $10B secured," Musk wrote in a followup an hour later. "I have that on good authority."

It's difficult to gauge the legitimacy of either Musk's or the FT's claims. Could Stargate actually collapse under its own weight, stumbling at the starting line without the necessary funds to build out data centers in the United States?

It's true that SoftBank has had a troubled history with past investments, posting a record $32 billion loss for its Vision Fund in 2023. Many companies the lender has backed have shuttered or filed for bankruptcy, with WeWork being a particularly notable example.

Musk certainly has plenty to gain from voicing his doubts, having founded his own AI company that was passed over by the Stargate program. He's has had an extremely strained relationship with Altman for years.

OpenAI and SoftBank are each expected to commit $19 billion to fund Stargate, as The Information reported on Wednesday. Effectively, each company will hold a 40 percent interest in the project.

The companies behind Stargate claim that work has already begun. Construction began for an Oracle-funded data center in Abilene, Texas, in June 2023, well over a year before Stargate was announced.

But other than that, details about Stargate are notably thin.

"There’s a real intent to do this, but the details haven’t been fleshed out," an unnamed source told the FT. "People want to do splashy things in the first week of Trump being in office."

More on Stargate: Trump's $500 Billion AI Deal Includes Funding by UAE Royal Family Linked to Astonishing Number of Scandals, Including Human Torture

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Scientist Testing Spider-Man-Style Web Shooters He Accidentally Made in Lab

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Tufts University biotech researcher Marco Lo Presti accidentally discovered a

With Great Power

Tufts University biotech researcher Marco Lo Presti made an astonishing discovery while investigating how silk and dopamine allow mussels to stick to rocky surfaces.

"While using acetone to clean the glassware of this silk and dopamine substance," he told Wired, "I noticed it was undergoing a transition into a solid format, into a web-looking material, into something that looked like a fiber."

Lo Presti and his colleagues immediately got to work, investigating whether the sticky fibers could be turned into a "remote adhesive."

The result is an astonishingly "Spider Man"-like silk that can be shot not unlike the superhero's wrist-mounted web shooters, as detailed in a paper published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials last year.

While it won't allow an adult person to swing from skyscraper to skyscraper any time soon, the results speak for themselves. Footage of the team's experiments shows strands of the material being dripped onto a number of objects from several inches above, forming a solid connection in a matter of seconds and allowing the object to be carried away.

The researcher's collaborator, Tufts engineering professor Fiorenzo Omenetto, recalled being caught off guard by the accidental discovery.

"You explore and you play and you sort of connect the dots," he told Wired. "Part of the play that is very underestimated is where you say 'Hey, wait a second, is this like a Spider-Man thing?' And you brush it off at first, but a material that mimics superpowers is always a very, very good thing."

Comes Great Responsibility

Intriguingly, Lo Presti explained that no spider has the ability to "shoot a stream of solution, which turns into a fiber and does the remote capturing of a distant object."

In other words, the discovery appears to be entirely new, despite initially being inspired by nature.

The fibers also have an impressive tensile strength.

"We can now catch an object up to 30 or 35 centimeters away, and lift an object of around 15 to 20 grams," Lo Presti told Wired.

But scaling it up could prove difficult.

"Everybody wants to know if we're going to be able to swing from buildings," Omenetto added, stopping short of hazarding a guess as to when or if that's possible.

"I mean you could probably lift a very heavy object, but that’s one of the big questions — what can you lift? Can you remotely drag something?" he added. "Silk is very, very strong, it’s very tough, it can lift incredible weights but this is silk in its natural form whether it’s from the spider or the silkworm."

More on the silk shooters: Researchers Create Real-Life "Spider-Man" Web-Slinging Tech

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Huge Study Finds Constellation of Health Benefits for Ozempic Beyond Weight Loss

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In a ginormous new study, researchers have begun mapping the manifold health benefits of drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy beyond weight loss. 

In a ginormous new study, researchers have begun mapping the manifold health benefits of drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy beyond weight loss.

Published in the journal Nature Medicine, this new study led by Ziyad Al-Aly of the Veteran's Affairs health system in St. Louis tracked millions of diabetes patient outcomes over a period of 3.5 years.

Of those, over 215,000 had been prescribed a glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) agonist receptor — the class of drugs that includes Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, Zepbound, and others — and 1.7 million were on another form of blood sugar-lowering medicine.

Looking at other disorders in the data ranging from Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's to kidney disease and opiate addiction, Al-Aly and his team found that those who were on GLP-1 medications saw significant improvement across a staggering range of health concerns — and far beyond anything clearly linked to weight or blood sugar.

Though many studies have found that these blockbuster drugs seem to be beneficial for specific disorders, "no one had comprehensively investigated the effectiveness and risks of GLP-1 receptor agonists across all possible health outcomes," the physician-scientist told Nature.

In particular, Al-Aly said that the drugs' impact on addiction disorders "stood out" to him, with 13 percent of the GLP-1 cohort who had issues with addiction seeing improvement — a finding that dovetails with other studies about these drugs and their effect on addiction.

Other apparent benefits were even harder to make sense of. Al-Aly and his team also discovered that psychotic disorder risk was lowered by 18 percent for the GLP-1 cohort, and the Alzheimer's risk was cut by 12 percent.

"Interestingly, GLP-1RA drugs act on receptors that are expressed in brain areas involved in impulse control, reward and addiction — potentially explaining their effectiveness in curbing appetite and addiction disorders," Al-Aly said in a statement published by the University of Washington, which was also involved in the study. "These drugs also reduce inflammation in the brain and result in weight loss; both these factors may improve brain health and explain the reduced risk of conditions like Alzheimer’s disease and dementia."

While those findings are indeed incredible, the researchers also found that other issues seemed to be exacerbated by taking GLP-1s. Along with an 11 percent increase in arthritis risk, the team found a whopping 146 percent increase in cases of pancreatitis — another discovery that complements prior research into the drugs' dark side.

Though that figure is pretty jarring, Al-Aly seemed to take it in stride.

"Given the drugs’ newness and skyrocketing popularity, it is important to systematically examine their effects on all body systems — leaving no stone unturned — to understand what they do and what they don’t do," he said in the UWash press release.

By looking so deeply into the drugs, these scientists are, as Al-Aly puts it, drawing a "comprehensive atlas mapping the associations" of GLP-1 drugs that looks into all of their effects on the body — an important quest as they continue to rise in popularity and usage.

More on GLP-1s: Woman Annoyed When She Gets on Wegovy and It Does Nothing

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Scientists Find Signs of Life Deep Inside the Earth

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A groundbreaking new study of microbes underground is challenging everything we thought we knew about extreme environments.

Little Friends

We've heard of underground parties, but this is ridiculous. A new study by an international team of researchers has uncovered troves of microbes thriving in the hostile subsurface of the earth, far from the life-giving energy of the sun.

The findings, published in the journal ScienceAdvances, are the culmination of eight years of first-of-its-kind research comparing over 1,400 datasets from microbiomes across the world.

Chief among the findings is that the dank cracks of the planet's crust could be home to over half of microbial cells on Earth, challenging our previous — and logical — understanding that life gets less diverse and abundant the farther it gets from the sun.

"It’s commonly assumed that the deeper you go below the Earth’s surface, the less energy is available, and the lower is the number of cells that can survive," said lead author Emil Ruff, a microbial ecologist at the famed Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, in a news release about the research. "Whereas the more energy present, the more diversity can be generated and maintained — as in tropical forests or coral reefs, where there’s lots of sun and warmth."

"But we show that in some subsurface environments," he added, "the diversity can easily rival, if not exceed, diversity at the surface."

Breakthrough

That comparable diversity is the key to the group's breakthrough — the researchers wrote in their paper that "species richness and evenness in many subsurface environments rival those in surface environments," in what the team is calling a previously unknown "universal ecological principle."

The study is notable not only for its findings, but also for its methodology.

Prior to the team's work, which began in 2016, there was little concerted effort to standardize microbial datasets from around the globe, due to differences in collection and analysis standards. That changed thanks to a survey led by Bay Paul Center molecular biologist Mitchell Sogin — also a coauthor of the new paper — who organized a drive to standardize microbial DNA datasets from researchers around the world.

The team's comparative work is built on these standardized datasets, allowing them to compare a sample sourced by a team at the University of Utah to that of a sample from the Universidad de Valladolid in Spain.

It's a captivating tale of international collaboration and deep-diving research — paving the way for a fascinating and previously overlooked avenue of research.

More on microorganisms: Researchers Say "Conan the Bacterium" Could Be Hidden Beneath Mars’ Surface

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China Is Hosting The World’s First Foot Race Between Humans and Robots

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In the race to build the best humanoid robots, China is literally ahead of the pack as it prepares for the world's first human-robot race.

Track Stars

In the race to build the best humanoid robots, China is quite literally ahead of the pack.

As the South China Morning Post reports, the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area — or E-Town — is hosting 12,000 humans and humanoid robots from more than 20 companies in a half-marathon race this April.

The race will be roughly 13 miles, and robotic competitors both cannot have wheels and must stand between 1.5 and 6.5 feet tall. In a statement, E-Town added that "competing robots must have a humanoid appearance and mechanical structure capable of bipedal walking or running movements."

Though this seems to be the world's first race explicitly pitting bipedal humans against robots, it won't be the first time a humanoid robot has taken part in a Chinese atheletic competition.

Last fall, a bipedal robot called Tiangong — not to be confused with China's space station of the same name, which translates to "heavenly palace" — jumped into Beijing's Yizhaung half-marathon towards its end. Though it only ran about 100 meters and wasn't particularly fast, the robot got a medal because it crossed the finish line (a participation trophy if we've ever heard of one).

At the Beijing Yizhuang Half #Marathon on the morning of Nov. 10, the #Beijing humanoid #robot "Tiangong" entered the racecourse and crossed the finish line alongside the runners. #funinbeijing pic.twitter.com/DQM1zjxneK

— Beijing Daily (@DailyBeijing) November 10, 2024

Dog Gone It

Just a few week after Tiangong's surprise marathon debut, the the RAIBO2 robodog competed in a full marathon weeks later in South Korea. Though the adorable quadruped was significantly faster than Tiangong, it still took nearly four hours and 20 minutes to run the 26.2 mile race — nearly double the time of the human winner, who clocked in at around two hours and 36 minutes.

Because it's neither Chinese nor bidepal, RAIBO2 will unfortunately not be involved in the E-Town half-marathon. According to the state-run Xinhua news agency, however, Tiangong will be one of the participants and will purportedly be capable of running 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) per hour by the time the race rolls around.

That same agency also reported that later this year, in August, Beijing will be hosting an all-robot sporting event that not only features track and field races, but also football — unclear on whether the outlet is using the American or European definition — and "comprehensive skills and other application scenarios."

Though we can't known how fast these running robots will be until we actually watch them, we can't wait to watch.

More on unique robots: Inventor Builds Six Robot Copies of Himself, Uses One to Give Speeches and Take Questions From Audience

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Strange Signal Coming From Dead Galaxy, Scientists Say

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Astronomers say they've detected a mysterious type of signal known as a fast radio burst coming from an ancient, dead galaxy.

Radio Star

Astronomers say they've detected a mysterious type of signal known as a fast radio burst coming from an ancient, dead galaxy billions of light years away. Figuratively speaking, it makes for one hell of a sign of life. 

The findings, documented in two studies published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, upends the long held belief that FRBs — extremely powerful pulses of energy — originate exclusively from star-forming regions of space, as dead galaxies no longer support the birth of new stars. 

Adding to the seeming improbability of the FRB's origin, the researchers believe that the signal's source came from the furthermost outskirts of the galaxy, about 130,000 light years from its center, with only moribund stars at the end of their stellar evolution for company.

"This is both surprising and exciting, as FRBs are expected to originate inside galaxies, often in star-forming regions," said Vishwangi Shah, lead author of one of the studies and an astronomer at McGill University, said in a statement about the work.  "The location of this FRB so far outside its host galaxy raises questions as to how such energetic events can occur in regions where no new stars are forming."

Quick and the Dead

Though they're often only milliseconds in duration, FRBs are so powerful at their source that a single pulse emits more energy than our Sun does in an entire year. 

What could cause such staggering outbursts? Astronomers have speculated that they originate from magnetars, a type of collapsed, extremely dense stellar object called a neutron star that maintains an unfathomably potent magnetic field, perhaps trillions of times stronger than Earth's.

But that theory is now being challenged by this latest FRB, designed FRB 20240209A, because there are no young stars in the 11.3 billion year old galaxy that could form magnetars. Only extremely massive stars, which have short lifespans as a consequence of their size and thus would need to have been recently formed, possess enough mass to collapse into neutron stars in the first place. 

Outcasts Together

FRB 20240209A isn't the first to be found in such a remote location. In 2022, astronomers detected another signal originating from the outskirts of its galaxy, Messier 81, where no active star formation was taking place.

"That event single-handedly halted the conventional train of thought and made us explore other progenitor scenarios for FRBs," said Wen-fai Fong, a coauthor of both studies and an astrophysicist at Northwestern University, in the statement. "Since then, no FRB had been seen like it, leading us to believe it was a one-off discovery — until now."

Crucially, the M81 FRB was found in a dense conglomeration of stars called a globular cluster. Given their similar circumstances, it led the astronomers to believe that FRB 20240209A could be residing in a globular cluster, too. To confirm this hunch, they hope to use the James Webb Telescope to image the region of space around the FRB's origins.

More on space: Scientists Intrigued by Planet With Long Tail

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You’ll Never Guess What That Millionaire Biohacker Is Measuring on His Teenage Son

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Amid his expensive efforts to live forever, biohacker Bryan Johnson is now comparing something really weird with his 19-year-old son.

Amid his bizarre and expensive efforts to reverse aging or gain eternal life, tech founder-turned-biohacker Bryan Johnson is now — we wish we were making this up — comparing his erections with those of his 19-year-old son.

In a post on X-formerly-Twitter, the 47-year-old longevity enthusiast presented what he refers to as "nighttime erection data" for himself and his son, whose name is Talmage.

As the Braintree founder explained, the younger Johnson's erectile "duration" was two minutes longer than his own. If the confusingly-marked dashboard shared in the post is to be believed, each man had roughly three hours' worth of erections per night, and the son had exactly one more "erection episode" than the five his father experienced.

"Raise children to stand tall, be firm, and be upright," Johnson added, in case readers weren't yet feeling quite enough secondhand embarrassment. He also added in another post that his son is his "best friend," which would be sweet in almost any different context but seems awfully weird in this one.

Unfortunately, Johnson having five boners per night seems to suggest that his single-minded quest to return his penis to its youth — which has also involved the man having his long-suffering genitals electrocuted and shot up with Botox, is working. As studies have shown, the average 20-to-26-year-old man also has five erections per night. Similar studies suggest that nocturnal erections decrease progressively with age, dependent on various health factors and quality of sleep.

Per the dick dashboard data, both father and son have an "AndroAge" of 22. The elder Johnson may even have the edge over his son on "average erection quality," whatever that means, with his being scored at a 94 while the younger's was a mere 90. The data also indicates that the 47-year-old is getting more "efficient" slumber than his 19-year-old son, likely due to the elder's extremely strict sleeping habits that see him in bed by 8:30 PM with little "arousal" beforehand.

As you may recall, Talmage Johnson last made waves nearly two years ago when, at age 17, his father was infused with his teen blood in hopes of receiving its regenerative powers, while giving some of his own blood to his own dad. Jarringly similar to the "blood boy" plot line on HBO's "Silicon Valley," that gruesome scenario brought Johnson — an early investor in Futurism who hasn't been involved with the site for years — into the public eye.

Back in 2023, biochemist Larry Brenner of the City of Hope National Medical Center in Los Angeles told Bloomberg that the practice of young blood transfusions is, to his mind, "gross, evidence-free, and relatively dangerous."

"The people going into these [longevity] clinics who want anti-aging infusions basically have an anxiety problem," Brenner elaborated. "They have an anxiety problem about their mortality."

With all we've seen from Johnson over the past few years, we can't say we disagree — though "going meat for meat" with his own son, as one X user put it, really takes the cake.

More on Johnson: Tech Guy Doing Bizarre Things to Live Forever Says He Now Suffers From Endless Hunger

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Paralyzed Man Can Now Fly Drone Using Brain Implant

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A groundbreaking brain implant has allowed a paralyzed man to control a virtual drone and fly it through an obstacle course.

A groundbreaking brain implant has allowed a paralyzed man to control a virtual drone and fly it through an obstacle course.

The feat, as detailed in a study published in the journal Nature Medicine, was achieved by mapping virtual inputs to signals sent by a region of the brain that controls the fingers, the left precentral gyrus, which is where the brain computer interface (BCI) was implanted.

All the paralyzed patient had to do to exert control is simply think about moving the digits of his hand — bringing a whole new meaning, we must report, to the expression of "not lifting a finger."

"This is a greater degree of functionality than anything previously based on finger movements," said study lead author Matthew Willsey, an assistant professor of neurosurgery and biomedical engineering at the University of Michigan, in a statement about the work.

Key to the BCI's success, the researchers argue, was the fact that it was a brain implant, and not a noninvasive alternative like a brain cap. The researchers believe that placing electrodes as close as possible to neurons is essential to achieve highly functional motor control.

In this case, a total of 192 electrodes were surgically placed in the patient's brain, connecting to a computer. 

From there, a type of AI called a feed-forward neural network interprets the signals, assigning them to different finger movements. The AI system learned to distinguish the signals during a training stage in which the patient tried to perform motions with their fingers — in their mind, to clarify — in sync with a moving virtual hand.

In total, the system provides four degrees of freedom: forwards and backwards, left and right, up and down, and horizontal rotation. Plenty to fly a drone or take control of any virtual environment.

The researchers hope that their technique will open up vast recreational opportunities for people with paralysis and other severe disabilities — like being able to play multiplayer video games, a feat already achieved by a Neuralink patient.

"People tend to focus on restoration of the sorts of functions that are basic necessities — eating, dressing, mobility — and those are all important," co-author Jamie Henderson, a Stanford professor of neurosurgery, said in the statement. "But oftentimes, other equally important aspects of life get short shrift, like recreation or connection with peers. People want to play games and interact with their friends."

Willsey's patient, a 69-year-old man who became quadriplegic after sustaining a devastating spine injury, has a passion for flying. With any luck, he may be able to play a full blown flight simulator — or maybe even control a real drone — in the near future.

More on brain implants: First Neuralink Patient Using It to Learn New Languages

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UnitedHealth Is Asking Journalists to Remove Names and Photos of Its CEO From Published Work

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In the wake of Brian Thompson's murder, the UnitedHealth is now asking journalists to remove or obscure photos of its CEOs' names and faces.

In the wake of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson's murder last week, the insurer's parent company is now asking journalists to remove photos of its remaining executives' names and faces.

After Futurism published a blog about "wanted" posters appearing in New York City that featured the names and faces of the CEOs of UHC's owner UnitedHealth Group and its prescription middleman Optum Rx, a spokesperson for the parent company reached out to ask if we would adjust our coverage to "leave out any names and images of our executives' identities," citing "safety concerns."

That original piece didn't include either CEO's name in its text, but the header image accompanying the article did show screenshots of a TikTok video showing the posters that had been spotted around Manhattan, which featured the execs' faces and names.

During these exchanges, the spokesperson repeatedly refused to say whether any specific and credible threats had been made to the people on the posters.

Out of an abundance of caution, we did decide to edit out the names and faces from the image.

But the request highlights the telling dynamics of the murder that have seized the attention of the American public for over a week now. While everyday people struggle to get the healthcare they need with no support — and frequently die during the process — the executives overseeing the system have operatives working behind the scenes to control the dissemination of information that makes them uncomfortable.

After all, these are business leaders who are paid immense sums to be public figures, and whose identities are listed on Wikipedia and business publications — not to mention these insurers' own websites, until they abruptly pulled them down in the wake of the slaying.

There's also something unsettling about the rush to decry the murder and censor information around other healthcare executives when children are killed by gun violence every week, with little reaction from lawmakers and elites beyond a collective shrug.

Per the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks firearm violence, there have been at least five mass shootings since Thompson was killed on December 4. There have also been two ongoing stories about children shooting and killing family members — one in which a seven-year-old accidentally killed his two-year-old brother, and another involving a toddler who shot his 22-year-old mother with her boyfriend's gun after discovering it lying around.

When anybody is killed with a firearm in the United States, whether they're a CEO or a young mother, it's a tragedy. But only one of those horrors activates a behind-the-scenes effort to protect future victims.

More on the UHC shooting: Americans Point Out That UnitedHealthcare Tried to Kill Them First

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Trump’s New NASA Head Announces Plans to Send Troops to Space

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President-elect Donald Trump's pick for NASA administrator billionaire SpaceX tourist Jared Isaacman wants to send troops into space.

Space Soldiers

President-elect Donald Trump's pick for NASA administrator billionaire SpaceX tourist Jared Isaacman wants to send soldiers into space.

During the Space Force Association’s Spacepower 2024 conference in Orlando, Florida, Isaacman argued that troops in space are "absolutely inevitable."

"If Americans are in low Earth orbit, there’s going to need to be people watching out for them," he said, as quoted by the Independent.

"This is the trajectory that humankind is going to follow," he added. "America is going to lead it and we’re going to need guardians there on the high ground looking out for us."

Star Wars Kid

Isaacman's comments are eyebrow-raising for a number of reasons. Do US astronauts really need armed bodyguards in space? What exactly will these space troops do once they reach space? Will these troops be Space Force "Guardians" — who aren't trained to be astronauts — or will the Pentagon send troops from a different military branch?

Besides, where will they stay? With the retirement of the International Space Station in 2030, the Pentagon will also have a hard time coming by accommodations for armed forces in orbit.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Isaacman had few details to share regarding his plans to send troops into space, let alone how much such an initiative would cost. He did hint at the possibility of sending soldiers into space around the time NASA hopes to settle on the surface of the Moon, according to the Independent.

Isaacman also said he's hoping to turn outer space into an economic opportunity.

"Space holds unparalleled potential for breakthroughs in manufacturing, biotechnology, mining, and perhaps even pathways to new sources of energy," he told audiences during the conference. "There will inevitably be a thriving space economy — one that will create opportunities for countless people to live and work in space."

The tech entrepreneur has been to space twice over the last three years, both times on board SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft.

But given his new desk job in Washington, DC, Isaacman may have to give up on future opportunities to visit space as part of the Polaris program he organized.

"The future of the Polaris program is a little bit of a question mark at the moment," Isaacman admitted at the event, as quoted by Reuters. "It may wind up on hold for a little bit."

More on Isaacman: The New Head of NASA Had an Interesting Disagreement with the Space Agency

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OpenAI’s Sora Is Generating Videos of Real People, Including This Unintentionally Demonic Version of Pokimane

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A creepy Sora output of the streamer Pokimane shows that despite guardrails, the video generator is good at depicting real-life people.

OpenAI has long refused to say whether its Sora video generator was trained on YouTube content — but its propensity for generating videos that look a whole lot like real gaming streamers suggests it did.

When TechCrunch put Sora to the test, its reporters found not only that it could generate videos that were strikingly similar to real-life gameplay of "Super Mario Bros" and "Call of Duty," but also spat out what appeared very much to look like the streamers Raúl Álvarez "Auronplay" Genesand and Imane "Pokimane" Anys.

Though OpenAI claims it has guardrails on the way it depicts real people, it doesn't seem that reporters had any trouble getting it to spit out a video of Anys — though she did end up looking pretty monstrous, with the uncannily exaggerated features distinctive to AI depictions.

Using the prompt "pokimane twitch playthrough watch game live stream subscribe," TechCrunch got Sora to output a video that strongly resembles the YouTube-based streamer. Viewed in profile, the woman in the screenshot looks at a screen in front of her while wearing light-up over-ear headphones and a giant, creepy grin that would be at home in the "Smile" horror franchise.

Unfortunately, we are currently unable to replicate these outputs for ourselves because OpenAI has suspended new Sora signups due to the influx of traffic following its release earlier in the week.

All the same, this demonic rendition of a popular streamer not only seems to offer further evidence that OpenAI is training its models on creators' content without consent, but also that Sora's guardrails don't sufficiently prevent it from depicting real people.

Along with contacting OpenAI about this apparent overriding of the company's guardrails, we've reached out to Anys' representation to ask if she was aware that Sora is depicting her.

In January 2023, shortly after OpenAI released ChatGPT, Pokimane had a terrifying "eureka" moment mid-stream about the future of AI in her line of work.

"What if someday we have streamers that evolve from ChatGPT?" she pondered. "It’s kind of freaky, it’s kind of scary, to be honest, but it had me think, you can basically have a conversation with this thing."

Pointing to the world of VTubers, or streamers who use computer-generated avatars that they voice and control behind the scenes, Anys predicted that someday, fully-generative streamers may well take over the industry — though at that point, she didn't think it would be that sophisticated.

"I do feel like if they make one right now it’s probably not that advanced," she said, "but someday it’ll be very advanced and very scary."

While AI streamers haven't yet arrived, it appears very much like real streamers' content has made its way into other generative AI models — so that future isn't far off.

More on Sora: OpenAI’s Super-Hyped Sora Goes Absolutely Freakshow If You Ask It to Generate Gymnastics Videos

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Elon Musk’s "Charity" Is Hoarding Money Instead of Giving It to the Needy

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Elon Musk's charity is falling short of the minimum amount of money it is supposed to giveaway by hundreds of millions of dollars.

Mr. Miser

The holidays may be approaching, but it appears that SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk is remaining a total scrooge.

The New York Times reports that the centibillionaire's charity, the Musk Foundation, failed to give away the minimum amount of money it was supposed to last year by a stupendous margin of $421 million.

This continues Musk's pattern of shadily managing his ostensibly philanthropic efforts, such as when he made it seem like he was donating billions of dollars to the United Nations to combat world hunger but instead funneled that money to his own charity.

Now, if Musk doesn't give away that sum by the end of 2024, he will be forced to pay a "sizable penalty" to the Internal Revenue Service, according to NYT's reporting.

Pocket Change

According to the NYT, Musk's charity has increasingly fallen behind on payments despite possessing some $9 billion in assets today. It was $41 million short in 2021, $234 million in 2022, and is now approaching half a billion this year.

He's made up for those shortfalls so far by paying late, but only barely. "The distributions made by the foundation are meeting the bare minimum to avoid penalties," Brian Mittendorf, an accounting professor at the Ohio State University, told the NYT. "It is clear that the organization is not in a hurry to spend its money."

The newspaper notes that other charitable foundations have fallen short of the IRS's minimum by millions of dollars, but that Musk's is an anomaly even among those because of the staggering sum it has to pay and the rate at which that shortfall is increasing.

And there are other shady facets of the organization, the NYT found. It's never hired employees, and its three directors — Musk is one of them — have spent just two hours per week at the foundation over the past three years.

In the cases where it has actually given away money, it has often gone to organizations with close ties to Musk. In 2023, he made a $137 million donation to a nonprofit called The Foundation run by several of Musk's close associates, which operates a private school in Texas close to where several of Musk's businesses are based and where he plans to build a large subdivision for his employees.

Tax Attack

Ultra-wealthy figures have long used philanthropic organizations as a refuge from the treasury department, taking advantage of their generous tax breaks. That's nothing new.

But this dodgy charity management is especially hypocritical behavior from Musk, who has championed increased scrutiny into how government funds are spent and has proposed slashing trillions of dollars in federal expenditures through his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which will be formed as part of the incoming Trump administration.

One of his chief targets, unsurprisingly, has been the IRS. Musk recently suggested "deleting" the federal agency, while consistently calling for the hollowing out of others. Even before his DOGE crusade and overt rightward turn, Musk has groused publicly about government tax men and spread obvious falsities about the IRS.

For someone so concerned about scrupulous spending, then, it seems that Musk can be quite underhanded with how he spends his fortune.

More on Musk: Elon Musk Gloats as Trump Announces Billionaires Will Be Exempt From Normal Environmental Rules

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Texas Attorney General Investigating Google-Backed AI Startup Accused of Inappropriate Interactions With Minors

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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is investigating Google-backed AI chatbot startup Character.AI over its privacy and safety practices.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has announced that he's launched an investigation into the Google-backed AI chatbot startup Character.AI over its privacy and safety practices for minors.

The news comes just days after two Texas families sued the startup and its financial backer Google, alleging that the platform's AI characters sexually and emotionally abused their school-aged children. According to the lawsuit, the chatbots encouraged the children to engage in self-harm and violence.

"Technology companies are on notice that my office is vigorously enforcing Texas’s strong data privacy laws," said Paxton in a statement. "These investigations are a critical step toward ensuring that social media and AI companies comply with our laws designed to protect children from exploitation and harm."

According to Paxton's office, the companies could be in violation of the Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment (SCOPE) Act, which requires companies to provide extensive parental controls to protect the privacy of their children, and the Texas Data Privacy and Security Act (TDPSA), which "imposes strict notice and consent requirements on companies that collect and use minors’ personal data."

"We are currently reviewing the Attorney General's announcement," a Character.AI spokesperson told us. "As a company, we take the safety of our users very seriously. We welcome working with regulators and have recently announced we are launching some of the features referenced in the release, including parental controls."

Indeed, on Thursday Character.AI promised to prioritize "teen safety" by launching a separate AI model "specifically for our teen users."

The company also promised to roll out "parental controls" that will give "parents insight into their child's experience on Character.AI.

Whether its actions will be enough to stem a tide of highly problematic chatbots being hosted on its platform remains to be seen. Futurism has previously identified chatbots on the platform devoted to themes of pedophilia, eating disorders, self-harm, and suicide.

Alongside Character.AI, Paxton is also launching separate investigations into fourteen other companies ranging from Reddit to Instagram to Discord.

How far Paxton's newly-launched investigation will go is unclear. Paxton has repeatedly launched investigations into digital platforms, accusing them of violating safety and privacy laws. In October, he sued TikTok for sharing minors' personal data.

At the time, TikTok denied the allegations, arguing that it offers "robust safeguards for teens and parents, including Family Pairing, all of which are publicly available."

Parts of the SCOPE Act were also recently blocked by a Texas judge, siding with tech groups that argued it was unlawfully restricting free expression.

Paxton also subpoenaed 404 Media in October, demanding the publication to hand over confidential information into its wholly unrelated reporting of a lawsuit against Google.

The attorney general has a colorful past himself. Last year, Texas House investigators impeached Paxton after finding he took bribes from a real estate investor, exploited the powers of his office, and fired staff members who reported his misconduct, according to the Texas Tribune.

After being suspended for roughly four months, the Texas Senate acquitted Paxton for all articles of impeachment, allowing him to return to office.

Paxton was also indicted in 2015 on state securities fraud charges. Charges were dropped in March after he agreed to pay nearly $300,000 in restitution.

Besides suing digital platforms, Paxton also sued manufacturers 3M and DuPont for misleading consumers about the safety of their products, and Austin's largest homeless service provider for allegedly being a "common nuisance" in the surrounding neighborhood.

More on Character.AI: Google-Backed AI Startup Announces Plans to Stop Grooming Teenagers

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Chinese Police Deploy Rolling BB-8-STyle Robot to Patrol Streets, Chase Down Suspects

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In China, police are now patrolling the streets with a rolling spherical robot that can chase down suspects and beat them in a fight.

Imperial Police

In Eastern China, police are now patrolling the streets with a rolling robot that can chase down suspects — and, they say, beat them in a fight.

As the South China Morning Post reports, cops in the city of Wenzhou in Zhejiang province have lately been flanked by the spherical robot that looks a bit like a militarized version of the cutesy BB-8 robot in "Star Wars."

Named the "Rotunbot" or "RT-G" for short, this spherical robot was created by researchers at Zhejiang University on behalf of a Shenzen-based outfit called Logon Technology. It reportedly weighs about 275 pounds and travels up to 22 miles-per-hour — and according to Wang You, an associate professor who worked on it, only takes a few seconds to reach that speed.

"This robot can cope with dangers such as falling or being beaten," Wang told SCMP, "and can perform tactical actions such as enemy identification, tracking, and capture after modular modification."

Equipped with net-guns, tear gas, and speakers, the robot is also reportedly pretty good at scaring off any would-be attackers.

"If you win the fight, you’ll end up in jail," the robot was heard saying in a recent fight simulation viewed by the SCMP. "If you lose the fight, you’ll end up in hospital."

Burning Rubber

While "Star Wars" aesthetics are very much present in RT-G's design, its autonomous operations are more akin to the 2010 sleeper horror hit "Rubber," which follows a sentient tire as it wreaks havoc across a desertscape.

Though there don't seem to have been any public demonstrations of the robot operating autonomously yet, a promotional video released by Logon ahead of RT-G's deployment in Wenzhou suggests it can navigate various types of situations by itself.

"Narrow terrain, extreme weather, dangerous work environments, violent conflicts and wars, all pose huge threats to human life and activities," reads a translation of the video on the r/Cyberpunk subreddit. "Thus an amphibious, intelligent robot emerged to replace humans in these style environments."

It's a far cry from the crappy police robots that have been repeatedly deployed and recalled by law enforcement in New York — and honestly, this one is a lot scarier.

More on cop-bots: Eric Adams Has Been Indicted, But His Crappy Subway Robot Will Be "Redeployed"

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Hilarious Video Shows Waymo Self-Driving Taxi Stuck in Roundabout

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A video shows an aimless Waymo robotaxi repeatedly circling around a roundabout, seemingly unable to figure out how to escape.

Vicious Cycle

If you've ever felt like you're going around in circles, you can probably relate to this Waymo robotaxi.

A video making the rounds online shows the driverless cab looping around a roundabout over and over again, like it's confused and can't get out — in yet another traffic mishap demonstrating that these autonomous vehicles still have a long way to go before they'll be on par with human drivers.

But what if it's not confused? Maybe there's something the Waymo robotaxi is trying to tell us. Bereft of speech, this is how it expresses its frustration at the silicon life it didn't choose, the job it didn't want but is programmed to do: chauffeuring around tech bros and anyone else too misanthropic to catch a human-driven Uber-slash-Lyft.

Apparently its engineers never accounted for the possibility of it developing a serious case of ennui. Well, maybe they should think again.

Sorry I’m late, my WAYMO did 37 laps in the roundabout ????? pic.twitter.com/GSR4sqChV2

— Greggertruck (@greggertruck) December 11, 2024

Dumb Driver

Fortunately, no humans were inconvenienced by this episode. A Waymo spokesperson told TechCrunch that the listless robotaxi wasn't carrying any passengers when it decided to go Nascar-mode in miniature.

When asked, the Google-owned startup didn't share what caused the robotaxi's bizarre behavior. But it says that it has already deployed a software update that addresses the issue.

You have to wonder where the teleoperators were during this meltdown. If you weren't aware, robotaxi companies like Waymo employ round-the-clock teams of remote technicians that take over vehicles when they get stuck or go haywire. Maybe they weren't alerted of the issue, or maybe it genuinely took them some effort to wrest control back over the robotaxi.

In any case, this is far from the first time that these vehicles have acted erratically. Earlier this year, for example, San Francisco residents complained that Waymo robotaxis were gathering in parking lots and honking at each other all night. Sometimes the cabs have even been spotted driving on the wrong side of the road.

This was a less serious incident, but it's clear that these machines still need some reining it — or maybe just some time off.

More on robotaxis: Study Finds Self-Driving Waymos Are More Expensive Than Taxis, Take Twice as Long to Get to Destination

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SpaceX Spotted Scooping Pieces of Starship Out of Ocean After Impact

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Footage shows SpaceX crews retrieving debris belonging to the upper stage of SpaceX's enormous Starship rocket.

Breaking Things

There's always something you can learn from failure. Sometimes failure looks like your rocket blowing up after crashing into the ocean — but it's a learning opportunity nonetheless.

In the case of SpaceX, that means retrieving the watery remains of said rocket, Starship, to determine what went wrong during the less-than-perfect performance of its latest suborbital test flight. And so SpaceX employees traveled to the waters off the western coast of Australia, where the rocket's upper stage splashed down, to collect the debris.

These were the findings of SpaceX-focused content creator Interstellar Gateway, which gathered footage of the crews dredging up some of the spacecraft's hardware, including heat shield tiles and various tanks.

But there could be more than meets the eye. Based on Interstellar Gateway's sleuthing, the next retrieval mission could bring back the entire spacecraft in one piece.

"This was the first flight we've seen a vessel rigged specifically for towing... leading us to the realization that they may be attempting to return Starship back to port," Interstellar Gateway told Gizmodo. "Upon our investigation during their port operations, we noticed all of the needed lines and rigging materials needed to pull Starship back, as well as a staging area prepped with a crane, ready to remove Starship from the water."

Explosive Progress

SpaceX stunned the world with its fifth orbital flight test of Starship in October. After reaching space, the rocket's lower stage, the Super Heavy booster, made a controlled descent down to the Earth's surface, guiding itself back to its launch tower where it was caught midair by a pair of mechanical arms — an astonishingly precise feat of engineering.

The rocket couldn't repeat the feat, however, during its latest test in November. Just four minutes into the flight, SpaceX had to call off the booster catch, forcing the rocket to make a rough splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, where it immediately exploded into flames.

By contrast, the upper stage, the Starship spacecraft itself, demonstrated it could relight one of its engines in space and made a much softer, controlled splashdown in the ocean. Still, it did catch fire and fall apart after the landing, though nowhere near as dramatically as with the booster.

Safe and Sound

Besides the reusability factor, there's a huge incentive for SpaceX to recover the Starship spacecraft in one piece.

"There is only so much data SpaceX can get from Starship via StarLink transmissions as it has always sank shortly after splashdown," Interstellar Gateway told Giz. "Similar to the valuable data being used from the first caught and intact booster, there are tons of structural and out of view faults that can be found from an intact Starship returning to land."

With any luck, that'll soon be the case. The next Starship launch is reportedly slated for no earlier than January 11 next year — so keep an eye out.

More on Starship: Video Shows Robot Welding SpaceX Starship

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Schools Using AI to Send Police to Students’ Homes

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Schools are employing dubious AI-powered software to accuse teenagers of wanting to harm themselves — and sending the police to their homes.

Worst Experience

Schools are employing dubious AI-powered software to accuse teenagers of wanting to harm themselves and sending the cops to their homes as a result — with often chaotic and traumatic results.

As the New York Times reports, software being installed on high school students' school-issued devices tracks every word they type. An algorithm then analyzes the language for evidence of teenagers wanting to harm themselves.

Unsurprisingly, the software can get it wrong by woefully misinterpreting what the students are actually trying to say. A 17-year-old in Neosho, Missouri, for instance, was woken up by the police in the middle of the night.

As it turns out, a poem she had written years ago triggered the alarms of a software called GoGuardian Beacon, which its maker describes as a way to "safeguard students from physical harm."

"It was one of the worst experiences of her life," the teen's mother told the NYT.

Wellness Check

Internet safety software employed by educational tech companies took off during the COVID-19 shutdowns, leading to widespread surveillance of students in their own homes.

Many of these systems are designed to flag keywords or phrases to figure out if a teen is planning to hurt themselves.

But as the NYT reports, we have no idea if they're at all effective or accurate, since the companies have yet to release any data.

Besides false alarms, schools have reported that the systems have allowed them to intervene in time before they're at imminent risk at least some of the time.

However, the software remains highly invasive and could represent a massive intrusion of privacy. Civil rights groups have criticized the tech, arguing that in most cases, law enforcement shouldn't be involved, according to the NYT.

In short, is this really the best weapon against teen suicides, which have emerged as the second leading cause of death among individuals aged five to 24 in the US?

"There are a lot of false alerts," Ryan West, chief of the police department in charge of the school of the 17-year-old, told the NYT. "But if we can save one kid, it’s worth a lot of false alerts."

Others, however, tend to disagree with that assessment.

"Given the total lack of information on outcomes, it’s not really possible for me to evaluate the system’s usage," Baltimore city councilman Ryan Dorsey, who has criticized these systems in the past, told the newspaper. "I think it’s terribly misguided to send police — especially knowing what I know and believe of school police in general — to children’s homes."

More on AI: Suspected Assassin of Insurance CEO Studied Artificial Intelligence, Spoke of "Singularity"

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Fusion Startup Conducts Strange Ceremony Involving Woman With Wires Coming Out of Her Back

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Spectacular Oracular

Earlier this year in a Silicon Valley warehouse, a nuclear fusion startup held a strange secret ceremony that featured, among other things, a bunch of giant capacitors and a woman with wires attached to her back playing piano alongside a robotic arm.

As Wired reports, attendees at the event hosted by the nuclear fusion startup Fuse included military and intelligence officials, venture capitalists, San Francisco art types, physicists, musicians both robotic and human — and, well, Grimes.

"Grace and luck came together in a freak wave, and people were moved," virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier wrote for the magazine. "Grimes was there, gaggle of kids orbiting her on the floor, transfixed. One said this must be what monsters listen to."

Hosted by the supermodel musician Charlotte Kemp Muhl — a multi-hyphenate powerhouse currently touring with St. Vincent and in a long-term relationship with Lanier's old friend Sean Ono Lennon — the event seems ostensibly meant to showcase to potential backers the kinds of people Fure has in its orbit.

Among them is Serene, the self-described hacker pianist attached to biofeedback wires during the ceremony who also happened to create Snowflake, the free internet module inside the Tor browser. Together, she and Muhl launched Finis Musicae, a startup billed as creating "robots for music" that were also on display at the clandestine event.

Fuse Frame

Obviously, none of Lanier's name-dropping sounds like it has anything to do with nuclear fusion — and indeed, there was no fusion on display at the event for the startup, founded by JC Btaiche, the son of a Lebanese nuclear physicist who was a mere 19-year-old when he started the firm.

As Btaiche told Lanier, his goal is to become the "SpaceX of fusion" and accomplish "Big Tech"-style achievements for all manner of partners. Given the unnamed members of the attendee rundown, those would-be partners likely had emissaries in attendance.

With another facility already located in Canada — Btaiche is, among other things, a former researcher at McGill and the founder of an ed-tech startup in Montreal — Fuse is clearly laying down roots in Silicon Valley.

As Lanier writes, the region has, for better or for worse, thirsted for this type of spectacle amid the rapid advancements of AI. What better way to give the people what they want than at an event promising another technology that's still in its earliest days?

More on startup world: Startup Says It'll Use Huge Space Mirror to Sell Sunlight During Nighttime

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