Journalists are using artificial intelligence avatars to combat Maduro’s media crackdown since disputed election

The Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, who spent some of his happiest years chronicling life in Caracas, once declared journalism “the best job in the world”.

Not so if you are reporting on today’s Venezuela, where journalists are feeling the heat as the South American country lurches towards full-blown dictatorship under President Nicolás Maduro.

Meta boss regrets bowing to government power and says he would not make the same choices today

The Meta boss, Mark Zuckerberg, has said he regrets bowing to what he claims was pressure from the US government to censor posts about Covid on Facebook and Instagram during the pandemic.

Zuckerberg said senior White House officials in Joe Biden’s administration “repeatedly pressured” Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to “censor certain Covid-19 content” during the pandemic.

Curtis Priem has a vision for a quantum computing future and believes the area along the Hudson valley is fertile for the next tech boom

The “quantum chandelier” that sits within a glass box in the chapel at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s campus in Troy, New York, is the symbolic centerpiece of an ambitious effort to turn upstate New York into an advanced technology center – what Silicon Valley is to social media or Cambridge, Massachusetts, is to biotech.

The silver sci-fi object, named for interior gold lattices that suspend, cool and isolate its processor, is the heart of a “quantum computing system” that could herald a new age of computing. It’s the centerpiece of the dream Curtis Priem, a co-founder of Nvidia, the $2.8tn artificial intelligence hardware and software company, has of turning Rensselaer, or RPI, into an advanced computing hub and refashioning this area of upstate New York into a new Silicon Valley.

Revisited: Guardian journalist Michael Safi delves into the world of artificial intelligence, exploring the dangers and promises it holds for society

This week we are revisiting the Black Box series. This episode was first broadcast on 7 March 2024.

For the past six months, the Guardian journalist Michael Safi has been trying to find out who is behind an AI company that creates deepfakes. These deepfakes are causing havoc around the world, with police and lawmakers baffled about how to deal with them. And in trying to answer one question, he has been left with a bigger one: is AI going to make it impossible to sort fact from fiction?

Trudeau also announces 25% tariff on imported steel and aluminum and says ‘China is not playing by the same rules’

Canada, following the lead of the United States, on Monday said it would impose a 100% tariff on the import of Chinese electric vehicles and also announced a 25% tariff on imported steel and aluminum from China.

The prime minister, Justin Trudeau , said Ottawa was acting to counter what he called China’s intentional, state-directed policy of over-capacity. But he did not specify whether tariffs would be softened or would be the same on Tesla, whose shares were down over 3% on Monday after the announcement.

A sociologist has produced a timely warning about the dangers of losing the relational in pursuit of efficiency and profit

In 2019, the Dutch supermarket company Jumbo began reserving some of its checkout lanes for those who wanted to stop and chat with the cashier on their way out. The move was a response to widespread loneliness, with the store’s chief commercial officer explaining that “it’s a small gesture but it’s a valuable one, particularly in a world that is becoming more digital and faster”. In a new book, the Last Human Job , the sociologist Allison Pugh writes of the consequences of a world that is accelerating away from, among other things, the time when “grocers knew their clients intimately; clerks kept close track of shoppers’ desires, their habits, and their families, soliciting views and peddling influence”.

The emphasis on speed, efficiency and profit has hollowed out work as a site of everyday, local human-to-human relationships. Jumbo’s approach was a Dutch collective finger in the dyke. Prof Pugh suggests that others will have to follow. She argues that current trends, which are most pronounced in the US, will be bad for society, not least because advanced nations are moving from being “thinking economies” to “ feeling economies ”, where an increasing number of jobs – from therapists and carers to teachers and consultants – are relational in nature. The academic describes as “connective labour” the jobs that rely on emotional understanding for their success. Underlying this work is “ second-person neuroscience ” that looks not at the knowledge inside individuals but at what exists between them.

Investigation into Pavel Durov relates to app’s alleged failure to stop spread of child sexual abuse material

Pavel Durov, the Russian-born billionaire co-founder of the Telegram messaging app, was arrested in France in connection with an investigation into criminal activity on the platform and a lack of cooperation with law enforcement, prosecutors announced on Monday.

Durov, who has French citizenship, was detained in a surprise arrest at Le Bourget airport , just outside Paris, on Saturday evening after arriving in the country from Azerbaijan on his private jet. His arrest has sparked debate over free speech worldwide and led to an outcry in Moscow.

Russian-born tech entrepreneur is accused of failing to take action to curb the use of his messaging app for crime

The arrest of Pavel Durov , the Russian-born founder of Telegram, in Paris on Saturday has thrown the spotlight on the messaging app. A police spokesperson told Reuters on Monday that Durov, who obtained a French passport in 2021, is under investigation by the national cyber crime and fraud offices for failing to cooperate over cyber and financial crimes on the app.

He has been praised for refusing to share data with the Kremlin. But if targeting CEOs worries Musk, Zuckerberg et al, so be it

The shock arrest of Telegram chief executive Pavel Durov as he stepped off his private jet in Bourget airport near Paris over the weekend is a startling, unprecedented event: he faces alleged offences that could include enabling fraud, drug trafficking, organised crime, promotion of terrorism and cyberbullying.

He may not be an Elon Musk or a Mark Zuckerberg, but he is the CEO of a tech platform with 900 million monthly users, and is the first big name in tech to find himself potentially on the wrong side of the European Union’s increasingly strict laws and regulations in the digital sphere.