According to an automated missive, I have the perfect set of skills to help write the first draft of AI history. It’s not a job for life, though

Say what you like about the Germans, you can always count on them to find just the right word for anything. Take “ weltschmerz ”, for example, which roughly translates to “world pain”. It signifies despair at the suffering in the world – and a deep anguish that stems from knowing that a better world is possible. Is there a more apt encapsulation of the current moment?

For the past six months I, like many others, have been suffering from an acute case of weltschmerz. As someone of Palestinian heritage I have been weighed down by survivor’s guilt as I’ve watched the unfolding genocide in Gaza. For a while, I didn’t have the emotional energy to write. The only way I could get out of bed and make it through the day was by avoiding the news completely. Which … isn’t an ideal scenario when you largely write about the news for a living. So, at one point, I decided on a career pivot and applied for various non-writing jobs, including one at a dog food manufacturer. Reader, I was rejected. In fact, I didn’t even make it to the first round of interviews; I was humbled by a dog’s dinner.

Hi-tech ‘golden triangle’ of Oxford, Cambridge and London risks deeper regional inequalities, says thinktank

Investments in new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) are “profoundly skewed” towards the “golden triangle” of Oxford, Cambridge and London, and risk deepening existing regional inequalities in England, according to research.

Ministers have promised to level up the country, narrowing the gap between the best- and worst-performing areas, but the rapid rollout of generative AI and automation could cut against that aspiration, according to the Institute for the Future of Work (IFOW).

Workers in Africa have been exploited first by being paid a pittance to help make chatbots, then by having their own words become AI-ese. Plus, new AI gadgets are coming for your smartphones

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We’re witnessing the birth of AI-ese, and it’s not what anyone could have guessed. Let’s delve deeper.

If you’ve spent enough time using AI assistants, you’ll have noticed a certain quality to the responses generated. Without a concerted effort to break the systems out of their default register, the text they spit out is, while grammatically and semantically sound, ineffably generated.

The images pop up in Mophat Okinyi’s mind when he’s alone, or when he’s about to sleep. Okinyi, a former content moderator for Open AI’s ChatGPT in Nairobi, Kenya, is one of four people in that role who have filed a petition to the Kenyan government calling for an investigation into what they describe as exploitative conditions for contractors reviewing the content that powers artificial intelligence programs.

If the experience of robot-served fast food dining is any indication, the future of sex robots is going to be very unpleasant

On 1 April, the same day California’s new $20 hourly minimum wage for fast food workers went into effect, a new restaurant opened in north-east Los Angeles that was conspicuously light on human staff.

CaliExpress by Flippy claims to be the world’s first fully autonomous restaurant, using a system of AI-powered robots to churn out fast food burgers and fries. A small number of humans are still required to push the buttons on the machines and assemble the burgers and toppings, but the companies involved tout that using their technology could cut labor costs, perhaps dramatically. “Eat the future,” they offer.

No one should be surprised that artificial intelligence is following a well-worn and entirely predictable financial arc

“Are we really in an AI bubble,” asked a reader of last month’s column about the apparently unstoppable rise of Nvidia, “and how would we know?” Good question, so I asked an AI about it and was pointed to Investopedia , which is written by humans who know about this stuff. It told me that a bubble goes through five stages – rather as Elisabeth Kübler-Ross said people do with grief . For investment bubbles, the five stages are displacement, boom, euphoria, profit-taking and panic. So let’s see how this maps on to our experience so far with AI.

First, displacement. That’s easy: it was ChatGPT wot dunnit. When it appeared on 30 November 2022, the world went, well, apeshit. So, everybody realised, this was what all the muttering surrounding AI was about! And people were bewitched by the discovery that you could converse with a machine and it would talk (well, write) back to you in coherent sentences. It was like the moment in the spring of 1993 when people saw Mosaic , the first proper web browser, and suddenly the penny dropped: so this was what that “internet” thingy was for. And then Netscape had its initial public offering in August 1995, when the stock went stratospheric and the first internet bubble started to inflate .

Concentration of power among just six big tech companies ‘could lead to winner takes all dynamics’

Just six major technology companies are at the heart of the AI sector through an “interconnected web” of more than 90 investments and partnerships links, the UK’s competition regulator has warned, sparking increased concern about the anti-competitive nature of the technology.

Sarah Cardell, chief executive of the Competition and Markets Authority, said AI foundation models – general-purpose AI systems such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini, on which consumer and business products are frequently built – were a potential “paradigm shift” for society.

Major elections around the world so far this year have not suffered from systematic malicious interference, says global affairs chief

Generative AI is overblown as an election risk, according to Meta’s Nick Clegg, who claims the technology is more useful for defending democracy than attacking it.

Speaking at the Meta AI Day event in London on Tuesday, the social network’s global affairs chief said that the evidence from major elections that have already been run this year around the world is that technology such as large language models, image and video generators, and speech synthesis tools aren’t being used in practice to subvert democracy.

His claims come with a caveat that shortages of training chips and growing demand for power could limit plans in the near term

Superhuman artificial intelligence that is smarter than anyone on Earth could exist next year, Elon Musk has said, unless the sector’s power and computing demands become unsustainable before then.

The prediction is a sharp tightening of an earlier claim from the multibillionaire, that superintelligent AI would exist by 2029. Whereas “superhuman” is generally defined as being smarter than any individual human at any specific task, superintelligent is often defined instead as being smarter than every human’s combined ability at any task.

In discovering malicious code that endangered global networks in open-source software, Andres Freund exposed our reliance on insecure, volunteer-maintained tech

On Good Friday, a Microsoft engineer named Andres Freund noticed something peculiar. He was using a software tool called SSH for securely logging into remote computers on the internet, but the interactions with the distant machines were significantly slower than usual. So he did some digging and found malicious code embedded in a software package called XZ Utils that was running on his machine. This is a critical utility for compressing (and decompressing) data running on the Linux operating system, the OS that powers the vast majority of publicly accessible internet servers across the world. Which means that every such machine is running XZ Utils.

Freund’s digging revealed that the malicious code had arrived in his machine via two recent updates to XZ Utils, and he alerted the Open Source Security list to reveal that those updates were the result of someone intentionally planting a backdoor in the compression software. It was what is called a “supply-chain attack” (like the catastrophic SolarWinds one of 2020 ) – where malicious software is not directly injected into targeted machines, but distributed by infecting the regular software updates to which all computer users are wearily accustomed. If you want to get malware out there, infecting the supply chain is the smart way to do it.