Category Archives: Futurism

Honestly: go off, IRS. Tax Code

Thought AI was only being used to eliminate the jobs of the working class? Sounds like maybe it's going to be used against the wealthy for a change.

In a Monday press release, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced that as part of a renewed effort to ensure fairness and crack down on lawbreakers, it'll start using "cutting-edge machine learning technology" to stop the US' wealthiest individuals and corporations from cheating on their taxes. According to the IRS, it'll use AI to find inconsistencies across a number of tax sectors including "partnership tax, general income tax and accounting, and international tax" in what it says is a "taxpayer segment that historically has been subject to limited examination coverage."

The AI integration is part of an effort to "ensure the IRS holds our wealthiest filers accountable to pay the full amount of what they owe," IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said in the release. The IRS is "deploying new resources towards cutting-edge technology," he added, "to improve our visibility on where the wealthy shield their income and focus staff attention on the areas of greatest abuse."

Lest you're worried about the tech being aimed at the poors, the release says the "groundbreaking collaboration among experts in data science and tax enforcement" will focus primarily on taxpayers with an annual income of over $1 million and more than $250,000 in tax debt, in addition to large corporate bodies.

And according to the IRS, the crackdown is already on the verge of getting started. By the end of September, the release says, the IRS will "open examinations" of "75 of the largest partnerships in the US." These partnerships will include "hedge funds, real estate investment partnerships, publicly traded partnerships," and "large law firms," among other ventures in various industries. On average, according to the IRS, these partnerships retain more than $10 billion in assets an eye-watering sum that apparently makes the partnerships ripe for the AI sleuth's digging.

It's a fascinating application for AI, as long as it actually gets results. The IRS is keeping specifics about the system pretty close to the vest, but it's pretty widely agreed that one of AI's strongest use cases tends to be pattern recognition. Massively deep pockets can make it easy, or at least easier, to obscure and subvert tax law; if the IRS' new system is indeed able to sift through those layers of obscurity, it could well be an effective means of both catching current offenders and dissuading future transgressions. As the saying goes: the bill always comes due.

More on AI-assisted money collection: Cursed New AI Calls Debtors to Hassle Them for Money

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The IRS Says It's Using AI to Bust Millionaire Tax Cheats - Futurism

It keeps getting worse. Give It Up

Last fall, Meta-formerly-Facebook unveiled its Meta Quest Pro, a long-rumored, higher-end follow-up to the company's best-selling Quest 2 VR headset.

The sleek device, which initially went on sale for an eye-watering $1,500, has really struggled to catch on since then, just as we predicted at the time.

And now, as Mixed Reality News reports, Meta is literally resorting to giving them away for free: Attendees of this year's developer conference for the global gaming platform Roblox each got a free Meta Quest Pro. While it's unclear how many people attended the event, it's aclear indication that the device isn't exactly flying off the shelves.

Meta told suppliers earlier this year that it wouldn't order new components for the device, indicating that production would end as the company ran out of parts.

To remedy the situation, Meta even tried to massively cut the price of the device to $999 back in March.

Then there's the upcoming Quest 3, set to be announced next month, which could also be dampening interest in the premium device.

Meta's Reality Labs is still spending billions of dollars developing the tech each quarter, and revenues are only a tiny fraction of that. Yet over the last three years, quarterly performance has only gotten worse.

Long story short, the company is clearly struggling to get traction for its metaverse ambitions, even by the damp standards of the VR industry. Only earlier this month did the device appear in SteamVR's hardware stats, a roundup of the kind of devices people use on Valve's popular VR content platform. According to Mixed, the Quest Pro's usage was a measly 0.39 percent.

For now, all eyes are on Apple. The tech giant has historically bided its time before entering a new market, and the same goes for its recent unveiling of an even more expensivepremium headset called the Vision Pro.

But whether the tech giant's $3,499 VR goggles will fare any better than the Quest Pro remains to be seen.

More on VR: Zuckerberg Has Been Working on Metaverse Legs This Whole Time

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Let's go! Fire & Ice

NASA and SpaceX notched an important milestone for theirupcoming crewed lunar mission: test-firing a SpaceX engine from a cold start in order to simulate conditions in the extremely ice-cold vacuum of space, according to a statement from the space agency.

SpaceX released video footage of the test on X-formerly-Twitter, showing the cold engine start of its Raptor engine last month. While lying face down, the engine successfully blasted a controlled jet of fire.

NASA is planning to use a lunar variant ofSpaceX's Starship spacecraft for the agency's crewed Artemis missions to the lunar surface, slated for 2025. The lunar lander needs to operate from a cold start because NASA envisions that the spacecraft may have to sit in the frigid temperatures of outer space for a relatively long time compared to a mission orbiting the Earth, according to NASA.

In 2o21, NASA awarded a $2.89 billion contract to SpaceX for its lunar lander. Last year, NASA awarded a contract option to SpaceX to further develop its Starship spacecraft.

The test sets the stage for SpaceX's long-awaited, second orbital launch attempt. With a green light from the Federal Aviation Administration, the test flight could occur as soon as next month.

The SpaceX test is notable not only for passing a crucial technological checkbox and cementing further the alliance between the company and NASA it's also a reminder of the burgeoning space race among world powers.

For example, last month, India landed its Vikram spacecraft on the lunar surface, near the south pole of the Moon.

A few weeks ago, Japan sent into orbit a satellite and a robotic moon landerthat will attempt to touch down on the surface after a long, meandering journey of several months.

Earlier this year, China publicized its ambitious plans to land astronauts on the Moon by 2030, ratcheting up its rivalry with the US.

But the race to the Moon and beyond is not without its perils. Case in point: Russia, which has been trying to follow up on the successes of the Soviet Union's space program, crash-landed during its recent attempt to explore the Moon's surface last month.

Despite these risky gambles, establishing a presence on the Moon is not just for international bragging rights. It serves as a launching pad to Mars and beyond and could reward countries with an abundance of space-based resources as well.

More on SpaceX: Spacexs Botched Starship Launch Left Wildlife Officials Stunned

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On Wednesday, US senators played host to nearly two dozen tech industry titans in a closed-door session in Washington, DC, discussing the future of AI. But despite the power vested in all those members of Congress, the senators were the ones who had to dutifully defer to their guests.

Wired reports that the over 60 senators "sat like school children," forbidden from speaking or raising their hands. And to be fair, the intent of the forum was to be educational but you'd be right to question the authority of a teacher who doesn't let their pupils ask questions.

Given the guests in attendance, their compliance may as well have been peremptory. Notables included Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

You don't need to do the exact math to know that their combined net worths rival that of a small, disproportionately wealthy nation.

Not all were on board with being on the receiving end of a schooling. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) complained that the private nature of the meeting and the lack of input from senators was counterproductive to actual lawmaking, and stifled the chance for cooperation.

"There's no feeling in the room," Warren told Wired. "Closed-door [sessions] for tech giants to come in and talk to senators and answer no tough questions is a terrible precedent for trying to develop any kind of legislation."

Still, the forum is undeniably a historic occasion. It's not every day you get all these guys in the same room to mouth off to Congress. And, further still, it's even rarer for them to all agree on something, or at least ostensibly: that the federal government must step in to regulate AI.

"It's important for us to have a referee," Musk, who recently launched his own AI firm, told reporters after the briefing, as quoted by Wired. "[It] may go down in history as very important to the future of civilization."

When Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who organized the meeting, asked if the government needs to regulate AI, the response was unanimous.

"Every single person raised their hand, even though they had diverse views," Schumer said, per Wired.

Having a consensus is a strong starting point, but ironing out what that regulation should look like or how it will be enforced will undoubtedly be divisive.

It's worth considering whether these corporate leaders should be the ones having the ears of the country's senators rather than, say, a panel of scientists and AI experts. Is this a show of good faith on Silicon Valley's part, paternalistic concern, dressed-up lobbying, or some plain-and-simple swindling?

Frustratingly, the closed-door nature of the meeting precludes us from getting any more insight. So for now, we'll have to take their word for it.

More on AI: The IRS Says It's Using AI to Bust Zillionaire Tax Cheats

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Tech Bros Lectured Congress About AI "Like Schoolchildren" Who ... - Futurism

That must be really difficult for him. No Signal

Jailhouse internet is so bad, apparently, that disgraced crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried's lawyers say it should be grounds for his release.

In a court filing, Bankman-Fried's lawyer Mark Cohen claimed that the Wi-Fi in the Brooklyn jail where the FTX founder is being held without bail is so slow, he can't get any work done on his defense.

Cohen listed a number of issues pertaining to his client's internet access, including transportation delays and the aforementioned slow Wi-Fi. It has been nearly impossible, the attorney claimed, for SBF to prepare for his swiftly approaching trial "with these kinds of limitations."

Though the Department of Justice claims that the 31-year-old crypto pariah should have access to multiple hard drives and databases as well as a laptop with sufficient battery his lawyer contends that the government's solution is nowhere near up to snuff.

"We believe that the current solution is untenable and we no longer have the time to see if the Government will be able to devise a plan that works," the attorney wrote. "Almost an entire month has passed since Mr. Bankman-Fried was remanded and we have lost that time to effectively prepare for trial."

Bankman-Fried has been locked up at a notorious jail in Brooklyn to await his upcoming fraud trial for almost a month after a judge ruled he tampered with witnesses while on $250 million bail at his parents' mansion in Palo Alto, California.

And conditions in this particular jail, given previous complaints filed by the likes of convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, paint a troubling picture, from . In other words, bad Wi-Fi is only the tip of the iceberg.

Though the argument is slightly different, this latest filing by Bankman-Fried's lawyers was the second time in a single week that the defense has made such a request.

To be fair, there is a ton of data for SBF to sift through before the scheduled start of his first trial on October 2. As his attorneys noted in yet another filing asking for him to be released from jail ahead of trial, "Bankman-Fried was spending 80-100 hours a week reviewing the voluminous discovery" provided by the government, which included "millions of pages of documents and terabytes of data."

All that said, it seems awfully clear that SBF's hired hands are intent on getting him the kind of preferential treatment that other folks detained in jailhouses will never see.

Then again, it also doesn't seem like senior US district judge Lewis Kaplan will budge, either, given that he was the one who remanded him to jail over allegedly tampering with witnesses in the first place.

More on FTX: It Sounds Like Caroline Ellison Has Some Major Dirt on Sam Bankman-Fried

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Sam Bankman-Fried Complains That the Wi-Fi Is Bad in Jail - Futurism

With government interest in unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) skyrocketing, NASA has announced its first-ever "UFO czar" after initially declining to do so out of concerns for his safety.

In a press release last week, NASA named its new director of UAP research, longtime civil servant Mark McInerney, in response to calls for the agency to "play a more prominent role in understanding" the phenomena and, it seems, because people started threatening the agency and people associated with it.

Last week, the agency held a press conference pegged to the release of an independent report about UAPs and announced that it was appointing a head of UAP research. However, NASA refused to name that person at the time because members of the study panel had been subjected to jeers and threats, as Politico and other outlets reported.

"Thats in part why we are not splashing the name of our new director out there, because science needs to be free," Dan Evans, NASA's assistant deputy associate administrator, told reporters at the time. "Some of [the incidents] rose to actual threats."

The incident highlights how much of a hot-button topic UAPs have become as of late. With government organizations like NASA taking recent reports of UFO sightings more seriously, we've seen a resurgence of conspiracy theories surrounding the existence of government cover-ups, and other far-fetched theories pertaining to the existence of extraterrestrial life.

Despite NASA's efforts to protect McInerney's identity, the agency eventually gave in to the pressure.

Nicola Fox, an associate NASA administrator, put it even more bluntly when asked directly by reporters about the new director's identity, saying "we will not give his name out."

Later that same day, however, NASA sent out an update that named McInerny as its new director with no apparent explanation as to the about-face.

It's still unclear why the agency released McInerny's name after initially declining to do so, and Futurism has reached out to NASA for clarity about that decision.

The institutional need for a "UFO czar"came as a recommendation from the study, which was led by David Spergel of the Simons Foundation. Among other things, the study panel called on NASA to work in tandem with other government agencies including the Pentagon, for which McInerney used to be a liaison at NASA to study UAPs, as Time reports.

As Spergel told the magazine, folks "harassed some of our panel members," which he rightfully characterized as "very inappropriate behavior."

On the whole, it's a win for the pursuit of science in the face of the persistent stigma surroundingUFO research but NASA's lack of disclosure about why McInerny was initially not named only serves to muddle the issue.

Given the jeers and abuse, it's clear that NASA still has a long way to go before its investigations into UAPs are fully taken seriously by the public, something that will only serve to impede the scientific process.

More on UFOs: Pentagon Launches Website to Watch Declassified UFO Videos

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Former NBA player Brandon Hunter passed away unexpectedly at the young age of 42 this week, a tragedy that rattled fans of his 2000s career with the Boston Celtics and Orlando Magic.

But in an unhinged twist on what was otherwise a somber news story, Microsoft's MSN news portal publisheda garbled, seemingly AI-generated article that derided Hunter as "useless" in its headline.

"Brandon Hunter useless at 42," read the article, which was quickly called outon social media. The rest of the brief report is even more incomprehensible, informing readers that Hunter "handed away" after achieving "vital success as a ahead [sic] for the Bobcats" and "performed in 67 video games."

Condemnation for the disrespectful article was swift and forceful.

"AI should not be writing obituaries," posted one reader. "Pay your damn writers MSN."

"The most dystopian part of this is that AI which replaces us will be as obtuse and stupid as this translation," wrote a redditor, "but for the money men, it's enough."

It's not the first time Microsoft a major backer of ChatGPT maker OpenAI has embarrassed itself with AI-generated content on MSN. It made headlines last month,for instance, after publishing a similarly incoherent AI-generated travel guide for Ottawa, Canadathat bizarrely recommended that tourists visit a local food bank. It deleted the bizarre article after criticism.

"The article was not published by an unsupervised AI," Jeff Jones, a senior director at Microsoft, claimed to The Verge at the time. "In this case, the content was generated through a combination of algorithmic techniques with human review, not a large language model or AI system."

The full story is that back in 2020, MSNfired the team of human journalists responsible for vetting content published on its platform. As a result, as we reported last year, the platform ended up syndicating large numbers of sloppy articles about topics as dubious Bigfoot and mermaids, which it deletedafter we pointed them out.

You might expect that these repeated self-inflicted embarrassments would lead MSN to increase its scrutiny of content shared with its vast audience.

"We are working to ensure this type of content isnt posted in future," Jones toldThe Vergelast month.

They don't seem to be succeeding, though. MSN promises on its "About Us" page that it ensures the "content we show aligns with our values" through "human oversight." But looking at some of the material being published on its site, that claim strains credibility.

Take the original publisher of the piece on Hunter's death, a publication going by the name of Race Track.Red flags abound, starting with the fact that its articles are bylined simply by an anonymous "Editor." The publication claims to distill the "essence of sports excellence" by being "your premier destination for all major sports news" and though it links to a Portuguese-languageautomotive magazine called Autogear in its MSN profile,that site's"About Us" page is entirely filled with Lorem ipsum text, placeholder verbiage commonly used by web designers.

Over the last 12 hours, the website has seemingly been taken down and presents visitors with a login page.

And despite having almost 100,000 followers on Facebook, the site's content gets almost zero engagement there.

Most obviously, a quick perusal of Race Track's profile shows that it has been using MSNto publish an uninterrupted stream of incoherent gobbledygook. One particularly ridiculous article profiles a "Corridor of Fame" football player called "Pleasure Taylor," which appears to be a mangled reference to NFL Hall of Famer Joy Taylor.

Another unintelligible recent piece slapped together by Race Track and republished by MSN bungled the story of Kevin Porter Jr's arrest for domestic violence, misstating facts as basic as the name of NYU Langone Medical Center, which it referred to as "Langone Medical Heart."

Upon closer examination, thearticles aren't just of abysmally low quality. As it turns out, they're also plagiarized.

Take the article about Hunter's death, which follows the same structure asa TMZ Sports story about his death, albeit with altered punctuation and a use of synonyms so liberal that the result is essentially incomprehensible.

Here's the first line of TMZ's write-up:

On review,the version published by MSN is obviously a chopped up remix:

Hunter, initially a extremely regarded highschool basketball participant in Cincinnati, achieved vital success as a ahead for the Bobcats.

He earned three first-team All-MAC convention alternatives and led the NCAA in rebounding throughout his senior season.Hunters expertise led to his choice because the 56th general decide within the 2003 NBA Draft.

Everywhere we looked, other Race Track articles on MSN are clearly ripped off from other publishers. The "Pleasure Taylor" item is evidently a mangled version of a blog byThe Cold Wire. A story about potholes in the United Kingdom is a butchered version of a piece in Autocar. And a post about tennis star Novak Djokovic is lifted fromTennis World.

After this story ran, MSN deleted the articles in question. Initially it continued publishing new articles byRace Track, but later all posts on the publication's MSN page disappeared as well.

"The accuracy of the content we publish from our partners is important to us, and we continue to enhance our systems to identify and prevent inaccurate information from appearing on our channels," a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement. "The story in question has been removed."

Needless to say, none of this bodes well for the information ecosystem. With publications eagerly looking to replace human editors and writers, AI has unleashed a barrage of dubiously sourced content sometimes by mainstream news sites ranging from CNET to The AV Club that threatens to further erode public trust in the media.

Accusing an NBA legend of being "useless" the week he died isn't just an offensive slip-up by a seemingly unsupervised algorithm, in other words. It's also a threat looming over the future of journalism.

Updated with comment from Microsoft.

More on AI journalism: Google Unveils Plan to Demolish the Journalism Industry Using AI

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Speech on X is free if you agree with Elon Musk. Broken Engagement

X-formerly-Twitter owner Elon Musk is seemingly limiting access to The New York Times on his platform, with engagement on X posts linking to the renowned newspaper tanking.

As Semafor reports, engagement for other influential news accounts like Politico and The Washington Post has remained relatively consistent. But one NYT link shared by former president Barack Obama reached fewer than 800,000 users, while a Politico link he shared got nearly 13 million views.

In other words, Semafor's analysis strongly suggests that Xis shifting away from what Musk perceives as left-leaning content and increasingly embracing conservative media.

If so, the hypocrisy is striking. Musk, after all, is a self-professed "free speech absolutist" so if he's throttling access to stuff he doesn't approve of, it represents a glaring double standard.

Musk has had it out for the NYT for a while now. Last month, he lashed out at the newspaperover a report about the far-right backlash to an old South African anti-apartheid song.

Shortly after, the site started making it more difficult to access content via external links on the social media platform by slowing down redirects to these sites. Affected sites included the New York Times,Reuters, Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, and Substack, theWashington Post reported at the time.

At the time, Musk called the NYT a "declining, once-powerful, but fundamentally doomed to be regionaland increasingly archaic legacy publication."

And that's without getting into an earlier and equally ugly chapter: back in December of last year, roughly a month into his chaotic stewardship of the social media platform, when Musk started mass suspending Twitter accounts of journalists who criticized him.

In short, Musk has made it clear with his recent decisions that free speech is simply not a priority on the platform. His actions, which have historically spoken even louder than words, paint a troubling picture of what X is turning into: a Wild West where disinformation, propaganda, and conspiracy theories flow freely.

Whether threatening to sue the Anti-Defamation League, suing the state of California over a law requiring social media companies to publicize their content moderation policies, or remaining silent after a man was sentenced to death for tweets critical of his government, add up to a winning strategy remains dubious at best.

In fact, Musk himself has admitted that X may be failing under his leadership and he seemingly has only himself to blame.

More on X: Elon Musk Says He Has to Sue Jewish Anti-Hate Group to Prove He's Not Antisemitic

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Oops! ChatNot

ChatGPT went down on Wednesday morning and the timing of its outage couldn't have been more unfortunate.

While OpenAI's world-beating chatbot suffered its second major outage in as many weeks, big tech executives were convening in Washington to plead their case to lawmakers over the future of AI.

Among several notable figures in attendance was Sam Altman, CEO of the AI startup who probably hoped to put on a better face amidst increased scrutiny over ChatGPT's falling user traffic for the past several months.

According to OpenAI's status page, the issue, described as "elevated error rates and increased latency," was being investigated starting at around 9am EST. Then, about an hour later, an update acknowledged an "outage for most conversations with ChatGPT."

It would take nearly two hours since the troubleshooting began before the incident was declared "resolved" a hefty length of time for any site to go down, nevermind with Congress looking to you as an industry leader.

Needless to say, it's not the best look for the world's (diminishingly) hottest AI product, especially since these outages have apparently spiked in frequency over the past few weeks.

The last outage of note occurred on August 31, during which the service "severely degraded."

But only two days before that, ChatGPThad suffered yet another "major outage," which blocked users from accessing the web UI entirely.

To add to OpenAI's worries, the chatbot continues to bleed users for the third month in a row, after reporting in July its first decline in web traffic since its release.

And in more ceremonious a loss, ChatGPT was stripped of its title as the fastest growing app in history, dethroned by Threads.

In Washington, Altman was joined by other industry titans including tech hyphenate Elon Musk, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

The meeting, known as the AI Insight Forum, was chiefly organized by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

"We all share the same incentives of getting this right," Altman said after the closed-door meeting, as quoted by The New York Times.

We'll have to wait and see how sincere he's being this time around. Altman has once before stressed the urgent need to regulate AI to lawmakers only to turn around and throw a tantrum over the EU doing just that.

More on ChatGPT: Paper Retracted When Authors Caught Using ChatGPT to Write It

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ChatGPT Goes Down Right as Sam Altman Defends It in Washington - Futurism

Elon Musk: "I don't do focus groups." Truck of Lemons

If you thought Tesla's Cybertruck looks weird and ungainly, you're not the only one. Apparently, some Tesla staff thought the same of the electric pickup with its sharp angles, futuristic silhouette, and absurdly large windshield wiper according to a new excerpt from Walter Isaacson's blockbuster just-dropped biography on Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

Some engineers at the company hated the Cybertruck so much,in fact, that they started to put together a secret alternative design for the Cybertruck in 2019, according to a section of the book highlighted by Insider.

"A majority of the people in this studio hated it," said Tesla design leader Franz von Holzhausen, as quoted in the book. "They were like, 'You can't be serious.' They didn't want to have anything to do with it. It was just too weird."

But that design apparently never gained traction, because the futuristic armored-looking demo Musk had unveiled back in November 2019 hews quite closely to the factory production model that has been recently seen in company-sanctioned photos and on the street.

"I don't do focus groups," Musk is quoted as saying in the book.

The Cybertruck has been plagued with issues such as misalignment of doors and smudgy exterior.

But as silly as you may think the Cybertruck's design, it's a serious venture for Musk and Tesla because they are going after the lucrative light-duty truck market dominated by the likes of Ford, whose F-series is the most popular and best-selling vehicle in the United States.

If Tesla gets it right, just as states like California mandate the sale of zero-emissions vehicles by 2035, and successfully takes a chunk of the market from Ford, which is pumping up their own electric light-duty truck in the market, then that would position Tesla to be a major automaker for years to come.

It's the kind of audacious move that's characteristic of Musk, who bought the social network Twitter last year and renamed it X.

Musk is going for all the marbles in the auto world and beyond but of course, it remains to be seen whether it will all pan out.

More on the Cybertruck: There's an Issue With Cybertrucks: They're Ridiculously Smudgy

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