Sotto Voce

A scammer attempting to trick Ferrari executives was thwarted by a stalwart safety measure: common sense.

As Bloomberg reports, the scammer in question earlier this month reached out to a Ferrari executive via WhatsApp. From an account with the name and profile of Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna — though not from the real CEO's usual number, of course — they attempted to convince the C-Suiter that a major acquisition was soon to be underway.

"Hey, did you hear about the big acquisition we're planning? I could need your help," the Vigna impersonator wrote, adding that they should be ready to sign a non-disclosure agreement ahead of the big deal.

"Italy's market regulator and Milan stock exchange have been already informed," the scammer continued. "Stay ready and please utmost discretion."

That's when things got even shadier, according to Bloomberg. The unnamed executive then jumped on the phone with the phony Vigna, who used a deepfaked voice to "speak" in a live conversation with the targeted scam-ee. In Vigna's voice, the scammer fibbed that the CEO was using a super-secret number to conduct super-secret business, hence the strange messages from the new number. But still not quite convinced, the executive asked the scammer a question that only the real Vigna would know: what book did the exec just lend to his high-powered boss?

And with that, the scammer hung up the phone. The enduring security question tactic stands strong!

Scamly Reunion

AI-powered deepfakes of human voices and even faces are getting increasingly convincing, meaning that it's getting increasingly difficult to rely on simply trying to dissect whether someone looks or sounds real. So, with deepfaked-abetted scam sprees on the rise, the Ferrari executive's time-tested strategy is a great example of a way to defend yourself — yes, this stuff can happen to anyone, not just executives of billion-dollar Italian companies — against a similar scam.

In the same vein, security experts have encouraged families to come up with secret "code words" to use with each other in the case that, say, a scammer impersonates a family member in a ploy to abscond with some cash.

While the attempted Ferrari scammer was foiled, other corporate executives should remain vigilant. Earlier this year, a CEO was fooled into handing over tens of millions of dollars to deepfake-assisted scammers. And in an incredible twist of irony, the security firm Know Be4 recently revealed that it was tricked into hiring a North Korean hacker as a remote worker, who used an AI-generated headshot to conceal their identity.

In other words, scammers stay scamming, and they're using AI to do it. Stay safe out there, kids!

More on AI scams: Security Firm Alarmed to Discover Their Remote Employee Is a North Korean Hacker

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Ferrari Exec Suspects Call From CEO Is Deepfaked, Asks Question Only He Would Know the Answer To

Hack Job

Over the weekend, Elon Musk posted an AI-doctored video of Vice President Kamala Harris on X-formerly-Twitter — and thus far, he hasn't apologized for it.

In the video, which Musk posted on July 26 and has since been viewed hundreds of millions of times, the presidential candidate's voice was altered to make it sound like she was bragging about being "the ultimate diversity hire."

"I'm both a woman and a person of color," the fake-Harris in the altered video says, "so if you criticize anything I say, you're both sexist and racist."

"This is amazing," the billionaire Donald Trump booster boasted of the video, originally posted by an account that calls itself @MrReaganUSA.

In that initial post, the user admitted that the video was a parody. When Musk posted it as his own, he made no such acknowledgment, seemingly violating X's own rules barring users from sharing "synthetic, manipulated or out-of-context media that may deceive or confuse people and lead to harm."

Other Foot

At press time, the video has been up for nearly three days, and although Musk spent the weekend posting his usual drivel — including misinformation suggesting Democrats are "importing" undocumented people to vote illegally and that the party controls Google — he hasn't said a word online or in response to press requests, including from Futurism, about the AI-manipulated video he shared.

Though Musk himself has stayed mum on the subject, the Harris campaign hasn't.

"We believe the American people want the real freedom, opportunity, and security Vice President Harris is offering," declares a statement from the campaign to CNN, "not the fake, manipulated lies of Elon Musk and Donald Trump."

Electioneering aside, it's not at all hard to imagine that if a Democratic donor shared a doctored video of Trump without disclosure or apology, Musk and his fellow travelers would be up in arms about it — but then again, that crowd isn't exactly known for not being hypocrites.

More on Musk: Elon Musk Accused of Withholding His Own Children From Visiting Grimes' Dying Grandmother After She Supported His Trans Daughter

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Elon Musk Won’t Apologize After Sharing Faked AI Video of Kamala Harris

Ready Or Not

SpaceX is slated to launch a billionaire benefactor into orbit for the world's first private spacewalk in the next few weeks — that is, if the mission doesn't get postponed yet again.

As Space.com reports, the Elon Musk-owned company admitted in a press briefing over the weekend that its Polaris Dawn mission will now launch no earlier than August 19 following reschedulings that pushed it back to July 31.

The mission, which will take fintech billionaire Jared Isaacman aboard a Falcon 9 rocket to become the first space tourist to ever attempt a spacewalk, was postponed in the wake of another of the company's rockets exploding earlier in July — though the official reasoning behind the slip seems to be traffic-related.

"There's a lot going on on [the International Space Station] right now," explained Sarah Walker, the director of SpaceX's Dragon mission management, during the presser. "We opted to fly the Crew-9 mission as our next [astronaut] mission and are ready to fly Polaris Dawn in late summer, as soon as we fulfill those obligations."

She later clarified that "late summer" meant at some point in August, Space.com notes.

Flying Solo-ish

This will be neither the first time Isaacman has flown up on a SpaceX rocket — he previously took an incredibly expensive orbital vacation in 2021 — nor the first time this specific mission has slipped launch dates.

As Space.com explains, Polaris Dawn was originally slated for late 2022, but it's been pushed back repeatedly. Given the official cause of the slip, it's unclear whether this most recent postponement is due to the Falcon 9 explosion or not.

When the Polaris Dawn mission — which is supposed to be the first of three additional trips after his first one — is finally launched, it won't link up with the ISS but will instead see Isaacman and his comrades fly farther into Earth's orbit than any other Dragon mission to date.

Postponements aside, it's nevertheless going to be incredible to watch Isaacman and the crew flying up with him to ghostride the whip — as he becomes the first space tourist ever to do so.

Updated to better describe the Falcon 9 failure.

More on space tourism: Billionaire Promised Crew Free Flights Around Moon, Then Dashed Their Dreams

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SpaceX Preparing to Launch Billionaire Adventurer for First Ever Private Spacewalk

Orbital Games

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) sent well wishes to the athletes competing in the Paris Olympics by putting on their own, zero-gravity spin on the international games.

On Friday, NASA released a video of ISS astronauts performing a series of athletic spoofs, starting with a faux ceremonial passing of the Olympic torch. The crewmembers then performed a series of zero-gravity Olympic events, with the ISS' lack of gravity assisting them as they attempted to take on sports generally made much harder by gravity: gymnastics favorites like the pommel horse and floor-style backflipping, track and field feats like the discus, shotput, and hurdles, as well as weightlifting, and more.

"Over the past few days on the International Space Station, we've had an absolute blast pretending to be Olympic athletes," NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick told the camera to close out the video, faux-lympic torch in hand. "We, of course, have had the benefit of weightlessness," he added, caveating the advantages of being gravity-free. "We can't imagine how hard this must be to be such a world-class athlete, doing your sports under actual gravity."

"So from all of us aboard the International Space Station," Dominick continued, "to every single athlete in the Olympic Games, Godspeed."

Ring Around

If we had to pick a favorite zero-G event, it would have to be the ISSers' take on weightlifting, in which one crewmember squats a bar affixed with two other astronauts, as opposed to traditional rounded weights.

The 2024 Paris Olympic Games will run through August 11. And while there are a dizzying number of events to watch from home, there's unfortunately yet to be a spacefaring portion of the quadrennial athletic showdown. But who knows — maybe one day, humanity's imagined Moon colonies will host. But until then, to all of the athletes, we'll echo the ISS crew's message: Godspeed!

More on ISS happenings: NASA Reportedly Considering Rescuing Stranded Astronauts Using SpaceX Spacecraft

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Astronauts Hold Their Own Olympics on Board Space Station

Known for genetic good looks, bizarre antics seemingly reminiscent of his "Grey Gardens" foremothers, and now, for being Vogue's latest political correspondent, Caroline Kennedy's 31-year-old son Jack Schlossberg has become the internet's latest nepo baby "It" boy.

That's why it was so shocking when this Futurism reporter happened to be scrolling back through the Kennedy scion's Instagram feed — it is, somehow, even stranger and more unhinged than one could reasonably expect.

Take, for instance, this post from August 2018 during what we'll call Schlossberg's "green period":

Like most of the other posts in this roughly four-year-long attempt to turn his IG grid into a lime green-and-white custom meme page, Schlossberg muses about the comparative differences between the definitions of "Holland" and "Netherlands," the first of which denotes a region in the country as a whole.

"Also: Convinced 'The Hague' doesn't exist," Schlossberg writes, apropos to nearly nothing beyond The Hague very much being the capital of The Netherlands.

A Kennedy thinking The Hague isn't real sounds like the punchline of a long-forgotten political joke, but there's definitely more where that came from, too.

Prior to this green period, Schlossberg appeared to have a strange amount of personal stanning for since-assassinated Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that occurred while his mother was the US ambassador to Japan.

After Abe was assassinated, the political heir explained in an Instagram story that the former PM and his mom were the only people who attended his 23rd birthday — but given that the oldest of those stan posts was made 10 years ago, before Schlossberg turned 23, it appears the fandom came before the party appearance.

While no one who's seen his "Ticket to Ride" rendition would accuse the raven-mopped Kennedy devisee of being, well, normal, the outright strangeness of his IG feed before his viral fame — you know, back when he was just the ultimate American nepo baby — makes him a lot more interesting than other influencers (to say nothing of people working for Anna Wintour).

It's worth at least a smirk that nobody has advised Schlossberg or his well-heeled family to clean up his feed — but then again, maybe that's part of the brand. After all, the Kennedy clan are having nothing if not a wild 2024 on the Internet. What's another one? It's another lesson in the forgettable permanence of one's posted past — until the spotlight hits. The eternal wisdom remains as ever: Cleanse your feed with fire every now and again.

More on political memes: "JD Vance Couch" Searches Outpace "Trump Shooting" Queries on Google

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Kennedy Thirst-Trapper Jack Schlossberg’s Instagram Feed Is Incredibly Unhinged

If you've been watching the Olympics, you might have seen Google's new ad pitching its generative AI-powered chatbot, Gemini. And if you have seen it, we're curious: did you roll your eyes to the back of your skull when you first saw it, too?

The commercial in question features a young girl who aspires to be like Team USA hurdling star and two-time Olympic gold medal winner Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. The girl's father, who narrates the ad, wants to help his daughter write a fan letter to her favorite athlete, so he turns to Gemini to help him do it.

"Help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney how inspiring she is," the father prompts the bot, "and be sure to mention how my daughter plans on breaking her world record one day. (She says sorry, not sorry.)"

Gemini then spits out the requested letter — which in the small portion that's visible looks perfectly generic.

But while we would hope that this father-daughter duo might then spruce up the AI-spun fan mail with some more personality, the intended message of the commercial — that generative AI is there to offer a helping hand to all, including tykes hoping to reach out to their favorite athlete — falls wildly, brutally flat.

After all, this kid isn't an executive trying to expedite penning a boring, bound-to-be-formulaic email. She's a child who, instead of learning how to express herself through words on paper, is instead being taught to turn to a computer program that automatically provides a soulless and formulaic facsimile of genuine expression to learn from. Depressing stuff.

To be clear, we're not saying that the fictional kid in the commercial shouldn't be able to get some actual help while writing her letter. Assistance is important, and it's part of how kids learn! They give it — a fan letter, a math problem, a new move on the field — their best shot, and a good teacher or parent or coach helps them by editing, adjusting, and providing some healthy guidance along the way. The kid hopefully takes the notes and learns, and in doing so, they get better. Conversely, a great way to not help kids get better at written communication (or anything, really) is to simply get someone or something else to do the work for them.

This isn't about trying to train a kid to be a professional writer one day. This is about foundational knowledge and skills. Just because a young person might not feel naturally inclined to a subject — hi, math — doesn't mean they shouldn't learn the basics anyway.

And elsewhere, what happened to simply learning to do hard things? Writing a piece of fan mail to someone you admire might be nerve-wracking, for kids and even for adults, but sometimes the only way to do something challenging is to sit down and force yourself to do it.

Of course, sometimes formulas are helpful. But learning how to build something from a blank page using your own brain, even if the result is formulaic, is a very different process from asking a machine to spit the whole first draft out from scratch. If you only know how to hem, you don't really know how to sew a dress.

There's a vast difference between being overly cautious about a technology and having reservations about where and how said technology should be applied. Again, if you're turning to AI to reduce the time that you, in this one short life, are using to send already-robotic company emails, be our guest. But teaching a malleable child who wants to express their admiration to someone who inspires them — in this case an athlete who, as New York Magazine's Matt Stieb touches on, represents human excellence in their field — by using a human-mimicking AI instead of what could have been a challenging-yet-rewarding learning experience woefully misses the mark.

In other words, throw this AI ad in the garbage heap next to Apple's creativity-annihilating iPad ad. And by the way? We can almost guarantee that the human on the other side would prefer the letter read like it was written by an earnest kid who tried their best, and not like they used a downloaded fan mail template and filled in the blanks like corporate Mad Libs.

More on bad tech ads: Apple's New Ad Showing Machines Crushing Human Creativity Is a Bit on the Nose

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Google's Latest Pitch for AI Is So Sad It Sounds Like a Spoof

The Crackcident

Tesla — and particularly its controversial CEO Elon Musk — are adamant that the divisive Cybertruck is the toughest vehicle money can buy — corroding body panels, severe electrical problems, failing wipers, failing steering systems, easily cracked windows, and stuck charging cables notwithstanding.

Real-world evidence, though, often differs. Take one video currently making the rounds on Musk's social media platform X-formerly-Twitter showing one daring Tesla fan walking on top of a gaudy, camouflage-wrapped Cybertruck.

"This thing was built to last," the person in the video can be heard saying as he clambers onto the roof. "I'm literally walking on this thing right now."

The windshield — one of the largest in the industry — gives in almost immediately, cracking audibly and forming a hairline fracture along the right side of the massive pane of glass — a $1,900 mistake that will likely put the truck out of commission for a long time.

American Made

What's particularly odd about the video is that the owner simply glosses over his screw-up as if nothing happened.

He also addressed the elephant in the room: the truck has become astonishingly unpopular in the mainstream, with critics calling it out for being ugly and a symbol of poor life choices.

The truck has also become a full-throated, $100,000 endorsement of Musk's increasingly polarizing world views, something that is actively discouraging buyers from choosing a Tesla.

"It's so funny, this is the most American-made car," he said, continuing to defend the vehicle even after cracking the windshield. "Y'all hate on this truck even though this redefines what trucking should've been. Tesla makes the most American-made cars period."

But is this really the ultimate symbol of America? Besides its negative connotations, production has proven a massive headache for Tesla, with Cybertrucks breaking down at an alarming rate.

Then again, the same could be argued for the United States.

More on the Cybertruck: Cybertrucks Need to Return to Garage Yet Again to Fix Parts That Keep Falling Off

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Tesla Fan Climbs on Cybertruck to Show How Tough It Is, Accidentally Cracks Windshield

Meta Fate

Facebook owner Meta has burned an astronomical amount of cash developing its augmented and virtual reality products — but none of them have really caught on yet.

As Yahoo Finance reports, the Mark Zuckerberg-led social media giant has spent almost $50 billion in just over four years, a staggering sum given that the products' pitiful revenues have barely made a dent in their soaring costs.

According to insiders, the massive spending has been due to a "chaotic" culture and mismanagement, marked by a revolving door of upper executives who often lacked any experience in the field.

While Zuckerberg has pulled the purse strings tighter lately, promising investors a "year of efficiency" starting in 2023, the company's Reality Labs has continued bleeding billions of dollars.

And now that the CEO has fully committed the company to developing AI tech, investors are left wondering: can Meta support both AI and Reality Labs without spending more than it can afford?

Reality Problems

Since 2020, spending on Reality Labs — which includes the development of the company's virtual reality headsets and its lackluster "metaverse" experience — has grown steadily, with reported expenses ballooning from $7.7 billion in 2020 to a whopping $18 billion in 2023. Meanwhile, revenue failed to breach $2.3 billion in 2021 — and sank to just $1.9 billion last year.

Insiders who spoke with Yahoo recalled that "local heroes" were promoted within Reality Labs, despite lacking any understanding of VR or AR tech.

"In software you can get away with that because you make mistakes and change things all the time," one former employee, who called the situation "pretty chaotic," told the outlet. "In hardware, you’re stuck with your mistakes for a long time."

"They play employee bingo," another employee added. "They move people into AR that don’t really understand it. It’s hardware and experience, not a news feed in your hand."

Zuckerberg's "metaverse," a virtual playground advertised to allow remote workers to be in the same virtual room, has also seemingly been a flop.

Analysts have also been unimpressed, with Deepwater Asset Management cofounder Gene Munster calling Reality Labs a "disaster from a financial perspective" in an interview with Yahoo.

In short, Zuckerberg's bet on the metaverse has so far been an unmitigated disaster — and given his newfound obsession with AI, it just might be an experiment he eventually abandons.

More on Reality Labs: Zuckerberg's Metaverse Is Bleeding Billions of Dollars, Documents Reveal

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Facebook's VR Department Is Apparently a Complete Catastrophe

Certain Accident

For roughly a decade now, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has made so-far empty promises about "solving" autonomous driving.

The company's erroneously named "Full Self-Driving" driver assistance software in particular has repeatedly drawn flak for endangering Tesla drivers daring enough to use it on public roads.

Now, Truist Securities analyst William Stein — who has a hold rating on Tesla's stock, meaning a recommendation to neither buy nor sell the stock — says he recently took the feature for a spin, finding that the tech simply isn't ready for prime time.

As Bloomberg reports, Stein almost rear-ended another vehicle that had "only partly completed a right turn."

"My quick intervention was absolutely required to avoid an otherwise certain accident," he wrote in a note to clients on Monday.

Eyes Off the Road

Stein's experience echoes plenty of other close calls and collisions using Tesla's driver assistance software, many of which have proved fatal — prompting an investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

And despite numerous over-the-air updates being issued to owners who were willing to spend up to $8,000 for the privilege of testing the system, the software is still woefully unprepared for the real world.

While driving around New York suburbs, Stein was shocked that he was able to turn his "head completely away from the road" without triggering any safety features: "The system continued for 20-40 seconds before issuing a warning," he wrote.

FSD also failed to pull over the vehicle when a police officer hand signaled for Stein to do so to allow a funeral procession to pass.

Stein did give Tesla some credit, concluding that FSD was "truly amazing, but not even close to ‘solving’ autonomy," referring to Musk's repeated promises of enabling actual self-driving.

It's a glaring report considering that Musk continues to double down on self-driving tech. The mercurial CEO recently promised to unveil a "robotaxi" that would presumably rely on FSD-like software.

But the robotaxi event has already been delayed from August to October, raising flags among Tesla bears. As far as we know, the company hasn't even applied for regulatory approval for a self-driving taxi service.

In short, despite many years of public testing — courtesy of paying customers, not trained engineers — FSD is still pretty rough around the edges, which could bode badly for Musk going all in on autonomous driving.

More on FSD: Tesla Stock Slaughtered After Its August "Robotaxi" Event Falls Apart

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Tesla Analyst Tries Full Self-Driving, Has to Stop It From Crashing

Feeling Dumb

It's no secret that multi-hyphenate billionaire Elon Musk spends an astonishing amount of time posting dubious political material on his social media echo chamber X-formerly-Twitter.

During a late Sunday night session, Musk cosigned a meme that reads: "If you ever feel dumb, just remember there are some people who still believe everything shown in [sic] news," resharing the image with a curt "yup."

But it didn't take long for Musk to out himself as one of those same gullible dupes who will believe anything if it flatters their preconceptions.

"This is messed up," he wrote a few hours later, at 3:42 am, as he reshared a video posted by Visegrád 24, an influential independent news account that tweets about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war that's well-known for posting fake news.

Visegrád 24 claimed the video showed "armed communist Maduro gangs 'Colectivos' are now storming polling stations in Punta Cardón," Venezuela.

But as an X community note quickly pointed out, that was a complete lie.

"Those are thieves stealing air conditioners and a woman can be heard in the video saying so," the note reads. "Voting in Venezuela is done on small computers that look nothing like what appears in this video."

Believing Everything

Musk quietly deleted the post without acknowledging that he'd spread fake news himself, the exact thing he'd just blamed the media for doing.

His hilariously timed blunder is far from the first. The mercurial CEO has a long history of bringing attention to racist conspiracy theories, outright propaganda, and completely made-up news reports, allowing hate speech and fake news to flourish on the platform.

Other users were alarmed at Musk blindly "believing everything" he sees on his platform.

"These are air conditioners, Elon Musk," one user tweeted. "Visegrad regularly posts fake news."

An account representing the distributed hacking group Anonymous chimed in as well.

"In an attempt at pushing propaganda, Elon pushes a false narrative that the thieves in the video are stealing ballot boxes," Anonymous tweeted, "when it's easy to see they're stealing air conditioning units for windows."

Last week, Musk shared an AI-generated video of vice president Kamala Harris, a flagrant violation of his platform's own policies.

In short, while a healthy dose of skepticism goes a long way when reading or watching the news, X-formerly-Twitter has quickly become a cesspool of unsourced claims and propaganda, making it a far worse place to catch up.

Worse yet, Musk's already tenuous connection to reality is as shaky as ever. With his endorsement of the notorious liar Donald Trump, Musk has clearly abandoned any commitment to the truth — a troubling development given the presidential election is right around the corner.

More on Musk: Elon Musk Won't Apologize After Sharing Faked AI Video of Kamala Harris

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Flying Low

Montero"Lil Nas X" Hill got lambasted by random people online for flying in a commercial plane, prompting the music star to say he's doing his part for the planet by not traveling in a fuel-guzzling private jet.

"[T]o all u bitches calling me broke for flying on a regular plane i don’t wanna see not one viral carbon footprint tweet when yall see my ass on a jet," he posted on the social media platform X-formerly-Twitter.

Critics of the rap-country-pop star were responding to his tweeted video posted a day earlier where he is seen smiling and laughing silently inside a noisy airplane cabin with a caption that seems to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris over ex-President Donald Trump.

Some replies agreed with his political seal of approval, while others trolled with pro-Trump messages. But a few poked at him for flying with the rest of the hoi polloi.

"[A]ren’t you supposed to be flying private? *gasp* are you... broke?" wrote one person.

That obviously got under Lil Nas' skin, which forced him to clap back to the online crowd.

to all u bitches calling me broke for flying on a regular plane i don’t wanna see not one viral carbon footprint tweet when yall see my ass on a jet https://t.co/lDanSyttkt

— ? ????·?•?????·???????????l (@LilNasX) July 27, 2024

Star Struck

Setting aside his political endorsement, Lil Nas X has a point about private jets.

For example, Taylor Swift has gotten immense flack for having possibly the highest carbon footprint of any celebrity, at an estimated 8,300 tons of carbon emissions annually as of 2022 because of her extensive private jet use, dwarfing the typical American carbon footprint of around 16 tons per year.

Now imagine a lot of other Taylor Swifts, in the form of people with lesser names but just as much money, flying private and emitting untold tons of carbon during their frequent travels.

For example, it's been estimated that about one percent of people were responsible for 50 percent of airplane carbon missions in 2018.

So Lil Nas X is in the right — not just is he doing the right thing for the planet, but he'd almost certainly be criticized for flying private.

Maybe some people just need to cool their jets.

More on airplanes: Want to Save the Environment? Experts Say You Should Stop Traveling

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Lil Nas X Is Flying Commercial to Avoid the Huge Carbon Footprint of a Private Jet

Speaker of the House

Artificial intelligence is being heralded as the future here on Earth, and according to a pair of scientists invested in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), it might even allow aliens to talk to us — or a version of us, at least.

In an editorial for Scientific American, SETI Institute astronomer Franch Marchis and NASA researcher Ignacio G. Lopez-Francois have teamed up together as "alien-curious scientists" to advocate for an AI-infused version of what those in their respective fields refer to as "messaging extraterrestrial intelligence," or METI for short.

Despite its heady implications, humans have been engaged in METI for as long as we've been going to space. Since the early 1960s, we Earthlings have sent everything from music and scientific formulas to Morse Code and maps out into the great beyond in hopes of hearing back — though thus far, those attempts at communicating with ETs have been for naught.

To Marchis and Lopez-Francois, these METI efforts can only be enhanced by introducing something as interactive as an AI large language model (LLM). In particular, they're arguing that we should send one out into space so it can speak for us.

"Aliens could," the duo wrote, "learn one of our languages, ask the LLM questions about us and receive replies that are representative of humanity."

Hello Out There

With the growing body of research about the potentially hundreds of millions of habitable exoplanets in our Milky Way galaxy alone, these alien-oriented scientists believe "several of these worlds could host technological civilizations curious to meet us and learn about us."

While one might argue that our current LLMs are not even up to snuff enough for humans to get much valuable communication out of them, these SETI scientists said that some open-source models, such as those made by Meta and Mistral, could already be fine-tuned enough to act as human emissaries.

After creating a human simulacrum fit for the stars, these alien-oriented LLMs could then be compressed, the pair explained, via the process of "quantization," which maps huge sets of data onto smaller sets. They could then be sent out to space using several methods — including radio, laser, or even copper disk communiqués — that could make the transmission of any LLM as rapid as possible (though Marchis and Lopez-Francois admitted that there's some massive technological hurdles that would have to be tackled first.)

"By sending well-curated large language models into the cosmos," they concluded, "we will open the door to unprecedented exchanges with extraterrestrial intelligences, ensuring that our legacy endures, even when we might not."

More on aliens and AI: We're Detecting No Alien Civilizations Because They Were Destroyed by AI, Astrophysicist Proposes

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Scientists Suggest Sending AI to Aliens So They Can Talk to It in Real Time

McGrid

Keeping generative AI models running requires astronomical amounts of electricity — and the United States' aging power grid is struggling to handle the load.

As CNBC reports, experts are worried that the massive surge in interest in the tech could prove to be a major infrastructure problem. Transformers used to turn raw electricity into usable power are on average 38 years old and have quickly become a prime source of power outages. Building new transmission lines has also proven unpopular, since the extra costs tend to be passed onto local residents, raising their electric bills.

And it's not just power that's proving to be a bottleneck for generative AI — the data centers that power it also need copious amounts of water to keep cool.

According to recent estimates by Boston Consulting Group, demand for data centers is rising at a brisk pace in the US, and is expected to make up 16 percent of total US power consumption by the year 2030. Whether the country's aging infrastructure will be able to support such a massive load remains to be seen.

Power Play

AI companies are already feeling the crunch, with data center company Vantage executive Jeff Tench telling CNBC that there's already a "slowdown" in Northern California because of a "lack of availability of power from the utilities here in this area."

"The industry itself is looking for places where there is either proximate access to renewables, either wind or solar, and other infrastructure that can be leveraged," he added, "whether it be part of an incentive program to convert what would have been a coal-fired plant into natural gas, or increasingly looking at ways in which to offtake power from nuclear facilities."

Tech leaders have floated exotic ideas for meeting sky-high energy demands. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told audiences at this year's World Economic Forum that the AI models of tomorrow would require a "breakthrough" — spurring him to invest in fusion power himself.

But despite decades of research, fusion energy currently remains largely hypothetical.

Other companies like Microsoft are looking into developing "small modular reactors" — basically scaled-down nuclear power plants — that could give data centers an in-situ boost.

Chipmakers are also hoping to reduce power demand by increasing the efficiency of AI chips.

But whether any of those efforts will be enough to meet the seemingly insatiable power demands of AI companies is anything but certain.

Meanwhile, the carbon footprint of generative AI continues to soar, with Google admitting in its latest environmental impact report that it's woefully behind its plan to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2030.

More on generative AI: Washington Post Launches AI to Answer Climate Questions, But It Won't Say Whether AI Is Bad for the Climate

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America's Ramshackle Power Grid Is Straining Under the Load of Generative AI

Common Denominator

Dark matter, the invisible substance believed to account for over 80 percent of the universe's mass, is not an easy thing to detect. We can see its gravitational pull on visible matter, however — which makes hydrogen, as the most common element out there, a prime candidate to watch for those interactions.

Taking advantage of this, a team of researchers have analyzed how hydrogen absorbs the light from distant sources like galaxies in an effect known as the "Lyman-Alpha Forest," and have applied this in a series of simulations to map the distribution of dark matter throughout the cosmos.

Their resulting study, published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astrophysics, confirms that there's a discrepancy between our observations of the universe and our predictions about its structures — and possibly points to the existence of a never-before-seen type of particle.

Ride or Dye

The universe is filled with hydrogen atoms, often in clouds of neutral hydrogen which make up most of the interstellar medium. In a spectrum of distant light sources like galaxies and quasars — whose structures are thought to be governed by dark matter's gravity — the areas where hydrogen absorbs the light along its journey to Earth show up as a staggered series of spiked lines that look like a forest.

"These are the atoms and molecules that the light has encountered along the way," said study coauthor Simon Bird, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Riverside, in a statement about the work. "Since each type of atom has a specific way of absorbing light, leaving a sort of signature in the spectrogram, it is possible to trace their presence, especially that of hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe."

Bird said to think of hydrogen as a dye and dark matter as water.

"The dye will follow where the water goes," he explained. "Dark matter gravitates so it has a gravitational potential. The hydrogen gas falls into it, and you use it as a tracer of the dark matter. Where it is denser there's more dark matter."

The Genuine Particle

What the researchers found by doing this reinforced the discrepancies, or "tensions," between what we observe about the universe's structures versus what our models predict.

"One of the current tensions is the number of galaxies on small scales and at low redshifts," Bird said. "The low redshift universe is the one relatively close to us."

Bird suggests two reasons for the discrepancies. One is the existence of a never-before-seen particle, which could be something like the Weakly Interact Massive Particles, or WIMPs, that are hypothesized to be dark matter.

The other is that "something strange" is going on with the supermassive black holes that form the center of galaxies — they could somehow be "stunting the growth" of their galaxies, throwing their structures out of the shapes we'd expect them to be.

"It's not completely convincing yet," Bird said. "But if this holds up in later data sets, then it is much more likely to be a new particle or some new type of physics, rather than the black holes messing up our calculations."

More on dark matter: Massive, Mysterious Objects Detected Floating Through Deep Space

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Scientists Analyzing Deep Space "Forest" to Map Dark Matter

Spacesuit Setback

Earlier this week, NASA astronaut Tracy Dyson discovered to her horror that water was squirting from her spacesuit 31 minutes into her and fellow astronaut Mike Barratt's spacewalk outside of the International Space Station.

Unsurprisingly, the space agency was forced to cut their journey short, with crews on board the orbital outpost investigating the leak ever since.

It's the latest in a long list of signs that NASA is sorely in need of a spacesuit refresh — the current design dates back to the agency's Space Shuttle Program in the 1980s.

But the agency's efforts to develop a new one with the help of the commercial space industry are also on thin ice.

As SpaceNews reports, contractor Collins Aerospace said it had agreed with NASA to essentially abandon its work on an ISS spacesuit replacement — which doesn't bode well, given the agency's ongoing problems with its existing equipment.

Intriguingly, NASA didn't give a reason as to why exactly Collins chose to abandon its NASA contract, suggesting there may be more to the story.

Crossover Event

Collins and Axiom Space were selected by NASA in June 2022 for its xEVAS commercially developed spacesuits program to cook up a pair of suits for the ISS and one for NASA's Artemis missions to the Moon, respectively.

While Collins announced in February that it had successfully tested a prototype suit, the company is officially pulling out.

"No further work will be performed on the task orders," NASA said in a statement to SpaceNews. "This action was agreed upon after Collins recognized its development timeline would not support the space station’s schedule and NASA’s mission objectives."

We can only guess as to why Collins decided to pull out. According to the report, industry insiders believe the development of the suit had already suffered delays and budget overruns, with Collins no longer being able to cover the costs for the fixed-price contract.

Fortunately, Axiom could soon come to the rescue, having signed a "crossover" task order last summer permitting it to figure out how to adapt its Moon suit for use on the ISS. SpaceX is also working on its own EVA suit, which will be tested for the first time during an upcoming mission.

Nonetheless, the news doesn't inspire confidence. This month alone, NASA had to scrub two spacewalks, including Dyson's harrowing experience this week.

The agency also implemented a seven-month hiatus on spacewalks in 2022 after an astronaut noticed excess water accumulating inside his helmet — a "close call" that could've led to him drowning while floating through the emptiness of space.

More on spacesuits: NASA Investigating Why Water Spewed From Spacesuit During Spacealk

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NASA Is Having a Spacesuit Crisis

Last year, OpenAI boasted about a seismic change to its flagship ChatGPT: the chatbot could "now browse the internet to provide you with current and authoritative information, complete with direct links to sources."

In theory, this is probably a good idea. AI systems like ChatGPT are notorious for making stuff up and ripping off original authors without giving credit, so it makes sense to show where the AI is pulling info from.

But in reality, ChatGPT's sources are often abysmal. When we quizzed ChatGPT-4o about current events, for instance, it repeatedly cited a sloppy scam news site that deluges the user with fake software updates and virus warnings.

Asked about the life and death of the late William Goines — a Bronze Star and a Navy Commendation Medal recipient who in the early 1960s became the first Black member of the modern-era Navy SEALs — ChatGPT ignored obituaries published by The New York Times and the Washington Post to instead promote an unknown site called County Local News.

If you actually visit the County Local News story recommended by ChatGPT — though we strongly recommend that you don't — it'll bring up malicious popups impersonating updates for Adobe Flash Player and other software.

Click the fake update and things get even worse, with the site going full-screen and showing a storm of phony virus notifications using the branding of the antivirus company McAfee.

And if you're foolish enough to allow notifications from the site, it'll even start harassing you on your desktop.

In other words, we tried to use ChatGPT as a web-searching news tool — and were sent directly to a scam-ridden, AI-generated slop farm that showed us fake software updates and virus notifications. (ChatGPT also recommended County Local News when asked for information on topics as diverse as the Rodney Vicknair trial and the actress Diane Keaton.)

Mark Stockley, a cybersecurity expert at the anti-malware company Malwarebytes, reviewed Country Local News and said the worst-case scenario from these types of malicious notifications is that users could be tricked into downloading a "Potentially Unwanted Program (PUP), a type of software that they probably don't want, that might be annoying or hard to remove," adding that the "PUP might be what they meant to download, a download that's different from the one they were expecting, or additional unwanted downloads alongside the one they were expecting."

"In the last 18 months, we have seen a huge surge in malicious advertising (malvertising) as a vector for spreading malware," he told Futurism. "Criminals take out ads on legitimate ad networks to lure people to fake websites and trick them into downloading malware, thinking it's a legitimate program."

"Malvertising mimics well-known brands and is extremely hard to spot," Stockley continued, "and the criminals who do it are able to abuse the ad networks' sophisticated targeting controls to make sure that people see fake ads for things they are likely to want."

To a skeptical human reader, County Local News is obviously covered in red flags. Its design is amateurish and its articles are a word soup of pink slime journalism that sometimes still include chunks of clearly AI-generated responses, like "Norfolk Shooting Update : Please provide more context or clarification for the term 'identified in' so that I can generate a relevant response." It's even been flagged multiple times by the misinformation watchdog group NewsGuard, which previously discovered OpenAI's GPT-4 citing a County Local News article pushing false, AI-spun claims related to Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu amid Israel's ongoing war in Gaza.

But to ChatGPT, this AI-generated chum is apparently a preferable source to the New York Times or the Washington Post — giving County Local News an air of legitimacy to ChatGPT users who trust its judgment.

And if those users ask ChatGPT to evaluate County Local News' credibility, it won't be much help. Ask it to assess the site's trustworthiness and it sometimes gives a milquetoast answer about how its "reliability can be better assessed by cross-referencing its reports with more established sources and considering the transparency of its editorial practices." Other times, it warns of the site's "publication of misleading information and failure to provide proper sourcing for its claims."

A spokesperson for McAfee, the antivirus company impersonated by the ads, excoriated ChatGPT for pointing users toward scams.

"Scammers are early adopters to trending technology. ChatGPT and similar technologies are seeing massive growth creating opportunities for scammers to profit," the spokesperson said. "Early indicators seem to suggest that users trust the output of these systems... Without further education, users may find themselves susceptible to misinformation, including scams, that find their way into these systems."

In response to questions about this story, OpenAI provided a familiar excuse: it'll fix ChatGPT's citation problems in the future.

"We are committed to a thriving ecosystem of publishers and creators by making it easier for people to find their content through our tools," the company said via a spokesperson. "Together with our news publisher partners, we're building an experience that blends conversational capabilities with their latest news content, ensuring proper attribution — an enhanced experience still in development and not yet available in ChatGPT."

A week later, ChatGPT was still citing County Local News, which was still showing users fake software updates and fraudulent virus scans.

More on AI search tools: There's Something Deeply Wrong With Perplexity

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ChatGPT-4o Is Sending Users to a Scammy Website That Floods Your Screen With Fake Virus Warnings

Mars Moss

Scientists in China claim to have discovered a kind of desert moss that thrives in a variety of conditions, from Antarctica to the Mojave desert — and which, they say, could survive on the surface of Mars without being sheltered inside a greenhouse.

As The Guardian reports, the moss — called Syntrichia caninervis — just might help transform the Red Planet's hostile environment, where the rocky surface experiences freezing average temperatures of minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and the atmosphere is not only 100 times less dense than Earth's but is made up of 95 percent carbon dioxide and less than one percent oxygen.

In other words, it would take some of the hardiest plants on Earth to grow on the planet's surface.

"The unique insights obtained in our study lay the foundation for outer space colonization using naturally selected plants adapted to extreme stress conditions," the researchers wrote in their paper, published in the journal The Innovation.

Lusty Lichen

Growing Earth-based plants on Mars could help us make its barren surface at least a little bit more habitable.

"Cultivating terrestrial plants is an important part of any long-term space mission because plants efficiently turn carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and carbohydrates – essentially the air and food that humans need to survive," University of Florida moss expert Stuart McDaniel told The Guardian. "Desert moss is not edible, but it could provide other important services in space."

Apart from allowing other plants to grow, the moss itself "is not tasty and does not make a great addition to the salad," SETI Institute researcher Agata Zupanska added.

For their paper, the Chinese researchers simulated the extremes of the Martian environment, finding that the desert moss miraculously survived five years at temperatures of minus 112 degrees Fahrenheit. It could even spring back to life after being almost completely dehydrated.

It was also astonishingly resistant to a barrage of radiation, and actually grew under certain doses of gamma rays.

"Looking to the future, we expect that this promising moss could be brought to Mars or the moon to further test the possibility of plant colonization and growth in outer space," the researchers concluded in their paper.

Yet plenty of questions remain.

"These experiments represent an important first step, but they do not show that the moss could be a significant source of oxygen under Martian conditions, nor do they show that the desert moss could reproduce and proliferate in the Martian context," McDaniel told The Guardian.

"In my opinion, we are getting close to growing plants in extraterrestrial greenhouses, and moss certainly has a place in those," Zupanska added, arguing that claiming the moss is ready to terraform Mars is an "exaggeration."

More on Mars: NASA Astronaut Says Elon Musk's Mars Colony Sounds "Horrible"

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Scientists Identify Plant That Could Grow on Mars

Not So Static

During what was supposed to be a static test launch, a private Chinese aerospace company accidentally launched one of its rockets, which crashed spectacularly into a nearby mountain.

As The Guardian reports, the Beijing Tianbing company, also known as Space Pioneer, admitted on its WeChat channel to the explosive error that occurred during a test of its Tianlong-3 rocket in the southwestern city of Gongyi.

In a translation of that social media statement, Space Pioneer said that the first stage of the Tianlong-3 test run had been going "normally" when the body of the reusable craft separated unexpectedly due to "structural failure."

"After liftoff, the onboard computer automatically shut down, and the rocket fell into a deep mountain 1.5 kilometers [0.93 miles] southwest of the test bench," the statement reads. "The rocket body disintegrated after falling into the mountain."

As video from Chinese news outlets and social media shows, the rocket landed in a wooded area of the hills surrounding Gongyi. Both the company and local authorities confirmed that nobody was hurt in the incident, though the rocket crash did, per the Gongyi emergency management service, cause a forest fire that has since been extinguished.

Wow. This is apparently what was supposed to be a STATIC FIRE TEST today of a Tianlong-3 first stage by China's Space Pioneer. That's catastrophic, not static. Firm was targeting an orbital launch in the coming months. https://t.co/BY9MgJeE7A pic.twitter.com/L6ronwLW1N

— Andrew Jones (@AJ_FI) June 30, 2024

Hot Rivalry

As Business Insider and other outlets note, the two-stage structure of the Tianlong-3 rocket is considered something of a rival to SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. Both are, for instance, designed to be reusable and both can theoretically take off with a mass of roughly 600 tons — though unlike the Falcon 9, the Tianlong series hasn't been test-launched hundreds of times to make sure things like this don't happen during a legit launch.

While SpaceX keeps its test launches to less-inhabited areas of the United States, Space Pioneer chooses, as The Guardian points out, to do its testing in a city populated by 800,000 people in the middle of China.

That fact, and the entire debacle, makes it pretty lucky that the Tianlong-3 accident didn't cause more damage than a quickly-extinguished forest fire.

More on rockets: Huge Chinese Rocket Parts Fall on Village, Spewing Toxic Chemicals

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Chinese Rocket Accidentally Launches During Test, Soars Over City and Crashes Into Mountain

A team of Chinese researchers has stuck a tiny organoid made from human stem cells into the body of a tiny robot, resulting in a Frankensteinian creation that can learn how to complete certain tasks.

As the South China Morning Post reports, the researchers from Tianjin University and the Southern University of Science and Technology hooked the brain tissue to a neural interface, allowing it to pass on instructions to the humanoid robot body.

The goal is to study brain-computer interfaces that can act as a mediator between electrical signals in the brain and computing power.

According to a statement by the researchers, the brainy robot is the "world’s first open-source brain-on-chip intelligent complex information interaction system."

The eyebrow-raising picture provided by the researchers, however, is a little misleading. As New Atlas points out, the pink blobs of what appear to be brain matter are simply mockups or "demonstration diagrams of future application scenarios" and are likely much smaller in real life.

The researchers' organoids were formed from human pluripotent stem cells, which have the capacity to divide and develop into different kinds of cells, such as brain tissues.

Beyond teaching a small humanoid robot to avoid obstacles or grip objects, scientists hope that organoids could eventually be used to repair the human brain through transplantation. For instance, scientists have previously suggested such transplants could help patients who have suffered a stroke.

"The transplant of human brain organoids into living brains is a novel method for advancing organoid development and function," the latest paper reads, as quoted by the SCMP. "Organoid grafts have a host-derived functional vasculature system and exhibit advanced maturation."

However, the research is still in its infancy and many questions remain. It's unclear, for instance, if damaged brain tissues could ever be repaired or reconstructed using organoids.

But researchers are nonetheless intrigued. Last year, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania inserted human neurons into the brains of rats with damaged visual cortices, leading some of the affected areas to spring back to life and respond to external stimuli such as light.

In their latest paper, the Chinese researchers treated the organoids with low-intensity ultrasound to find new ways to integrate them into the human brain. They found that the ultrasound supported the formation of networks within the host, a potentially non-invasive method to help patients suffering from brain damage.

For now, the ultrasound could help bridge the gap between organoids and a computing interface — a small step towards a future where lab-grown brain tissue could help restore functions in the human brain.

And with all apologies to the researchers, best of luck avoiding comparisons to "RoboCop 2":

More on organoids: Scientists Grow Teeny Tiny Testicles in Laboratory

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Scientists Create Robot Controlled by Blob of Human Brain Cells

Neuralink has canceled its second human implantation surgery after discovering additional medical issues in the patient who was going to get the brain chip.

As Bloomberg reports, the unnamed candidate suffers from the neurodegenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

Though the exact medical issues weren't disclosed due to patient confidentiality laws, the CEO of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix — which the Elon Musk-owned company also used for its first implantation — said that it made the candidate unsuitable for this second human trial.

"Selecting the right patient for a trial like this is important," Michael Lawton, the CEO of the Barrow facility, told Bloomberg. "Everybody involved, clinically and surgically, wants to get it right."

Though Musk has talked a big talk about getting his own Neuralink chip implanted, the company is currently focusing on people who suffer from conditions that can lead to motor skills and even paralysis. Its first patient, 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh, became paralyzed in all four of his limbs during a diving accident in 2016.

Lawton told Bloomberg that a replacement candidate is likely to undergo surgery to implant the brain chip next month, though he didn't add any more information about who that candidate may be or what condition they may have.

Notably, Neuralink itself has not made any statement about the surgery cancellation or responded to press requests from either Bloomberg or Futurism. Neither has Musk, though he did retweet a video interview with Arbaugh after news broke about the second implantation being canceled.

This setback in human trials is just the latest in a string of mixed news for the company after reports began indicating that the 29-year-old quadriplegic's implant was already starting to lose functionality just a few months after it was implanted at the beginning of 2024. The issue with that first implant was related to how deep the threads inside the quarter-sized chip went into Arbaugh's brain, and the company has admitted that it knew it might start to malfunction and went ahead with the surgery anyway.

There's still a lot that's unclear about Neuralink's next surgery, but we do know that the company plans to jam wires even deeper into their brain than with Arbaugh — a gruesome prospect, especially considering what happened to all those Neuralink lab monkeys just a few years ago.

More on Neuralink: First Neuralink Patient Says Implant Has Given Him Incredible Gaming Skills

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Neuralink Cancels Second Implant Surgery Due to Medical Issues