Big Tech News Stories
On Thursday, a U.S. Army Special Forces soldier who was involved in the raid to capture Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela was arrested on charges that he used classified information to make more than $400,000 by betting on the operation before it happened. In the hours before the U.S. attacked Iran, hundreds of anonymous bets over $1,000 were placed on the U.S. striking Iran by the next day, which the New York Times said suggested that some users might’ve “seen the strike coming.” Prediction markets, such as industry leaders Polymarket and Kalshi, have exploded in popularity. They create or exacerbate an array of problems, but at the Media and Democracy Project, or MAD, we believe they have the potential to severely harm the way news is reported, perceived, and engaged with. Suppose that prediction markets achieve their claims of providing better forecasts than other methods. Casino journalism [would still be] bad for journalism and the public. Most of the “propositions” offered on these markets are based on news reports; reporters provide the raw material on which these bets are made. In effect, traders on prediction markets are betting on the content of news stories. An Israeli journalist recently received death threats over his refusal to rewrite his report on an Iranian missile strike, on which $23 million of prediction market “investments” were riding. As the markets become larger, and their use in news increases, the incentive for market manipulation will also grow.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption and Big Tech.
Chatbots and AI-generated search summaries – which are rapidly transforming the way people get their information – both use Wikipedia as a key source. Now, we can reveal Wikipedia has been subject to shady, paid-for edits ordered by partners at an elite London PR firm with links to Downing Street. And the clients who benefitted from this “wikilaundering” are some of the world’s richest and most powerful people. The firm in question is Portland Communications. And it has been busted once already for this practice. After the firm was exposed, former employees told us, it simply started hiring middlemen instead. As one of them put it: “No one said, ‘We should stop doing this.’ The question was how we could keep doing it without getting caught.” Portland’s subcontractors have ... obscured mentions of a major terrorist-financing case involving Qatari businessmen; scrubbed evidence that a billion-dollar Gates-funded project failed in its mission; and promoted one side of Libya’s post-Gaddafi government over the other. Often, however, their changes were more subtle: burying bad press under descriptions of a client’s philanthropic work or swapping out critical news references with something more positive. “Small Wikipedia edits punch above their weight,” explained Alberto Fittarelli ... at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. “Small, incremental changes are likely to stick for longer. These kinds of edits make narratives seem credible precisely because they are hardly noticeable. Once that enters the information stream, it becomes really hard to claw it back.”
Note: Read how Wikipedia is systematically manipulated by the military-intelligence complex. The CIA, FBI, and the Pentagon has secretly edited entries in Wikipedia, including removing references to CIA illegal rendition and torture, downplaying US involvement in Iraqi civilian deaths, and rewriting the definition of “terrorism” to expand its political use. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on media manipulation.
The three million Epstein files recently released by the Department of Justice (DOJ) recast Jeffrey Epstein as more than a criminal sex trafficker, an intelligence asset, or a professional blackmailer. The files also suggest he had a role to play in the creation of today’s online far-right politics. “Brexit, just the beginning,” he wrote to Palantir founder ... Peter Thiel in 2016, celebrating the onset of “tribalism” and the unraveling of globalisation. Epstein appeared to view right-wing populism as an opportunity – and to understand very early how the internet could be used to accelerate it. Rather than simply watching this new ecosystem emerge, however, he seems to have played a part in its formation. In October 2011, Jeffrey Epstein met with the creator of the anonymous message board 4chan. His conversation with Christopher “moot” Poole took place just days before the fateful relaunch of 4chan’s influential far-right imageboard, /pol/ (shorthand for “Politically Incorrect”). That board in particular, and the site more broadly, would come to serve as a breeding ground for the far-right’s online activism. In an email to Epstein, the late sex-trafficker’s associate and former Bill Gates advisor Boris Nikolic (who introduced Poole and Epstein) cites a Washington Post article from 2010. It describes 4chan as a “hive mind” with a unique power to ... create “mass disruptions.” Epstein did not lose sight of 4chan. He tried repeatedly to pin Poole down for further meetings in 2012.
Note: QAnon originally launched on 4chan's /pol/ board in October 2017. Don't miss part one and part two of our investigations into the Epstein files so far. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on media manipulation and Jeffrey Epstein's criminal enterprise.
In the absence of strong privacy laws, surveillance-based advertising has become the norm online. Companies track our online and offline activity, then share it with ad tech companies and data brokers to help target ads. Law enforcement agencies take advantage of this advertising system to buy information about us that they would normally need a warrant for, like location data. They rely on the multi-billion-dollar data broker industry to buy location data harvested from people’s smartphones. We’ve known for years that location data brokers are one part of federal law enforcement's massive surveillance arsenal. But a document recently obtained by 404 Media is the first time CBP has acknowledged the location data it buys is partially sourced from the system powering nearly every ad you see online: real-time bidding (RTB). As CBP puts it, “RTB-sourced location data is recorded when an advertisement is served.” Apps for weather, navigation, dating, fitness, and “family safety” often request location permissions to enable key features. But once an app has access to your location, it could share it with data. Here are two basic steps you can take to better protect your location data: 1. Disable your mobile advertising ID, and 2. Review apps you’ve granted location permissions to. If you can’t disable location access completely for an app, limit it to only when you have the app open or only approximate location instead of precise location.
Note: The owner of a data broker company once bragged about having highly detailed personal information on nearly all internet users. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.
New York City's public hospital system is paying millions to Palantir, the controversial ICE and military contractor. Since 2023, the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation has paid Palantir nearly $4 million to improve its ability to track down payment for the services provided at its hospitals and medical clinics. Palantir, a data analysis firm that's now a Wall Street giant thanks to its lucrative work with the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence community, deploys its software to make more efficient the billing of Medicaid and other public benefits. That includes automated scanning of patient health notes to “increase charges captured from missed opportunities,” contract materials reviewed by The Intercept show. It's Palantir's work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that is drawing the most protest today. The company provides a variety of services to help the federal government find and deport immigrants. ICE's Palantir-furnished case management software, for example, “plays a critical role in supporting the daily operations of ICE, ensuring critical mission success,” according to federal contracting documents. Palantir's contract with New York's public health care system allows the company to work with patients' protected health information, or PHI. With permission from New York City Health and Hospitals, Palantir can “de-identify PHI and utilize de-identified PHI for purposes other than research,” the contract states.
Note: Listen to an audio clip of Jeffrey Epstein promoting Palantir to Ehud Barak. Read how Palantir helped the NSA spy on the entire planet. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.
The AI surveillance platform provider Palantir is no stranger to controversy. It brings in billions each year from controversial partnerships with groups like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Israeli Defense Forces, something CEO Alex Karp isn’t keen on changing anytime soon. In an interview ... this week, Karp even took it a step further, arguing that legalizing US war crimes would open up a whole new market for Palantir. Unlike other moguls profiting off the military industrial complex who hide behind concepts like “democracy” and “national security,” the Palantir CEO isn’t afraid to put his mouth where his money is with disarmingly bombastic language. In a letter to shareholders earlier this year, for instance, Karp quoted hawkish political scholar Samuel Huntington in arguing that the “rise of the West was not made possible ‘by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion… but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.'” While this could be seen as a damning indictment of Western civilization and its violent stranglehold over the world economy, Karp instead positions it as a source of inspiration. In another part of his interview ... the Palantir CEO reaffirmed his commitment to ICE, emphasizing the important role he plays in making immigrants lives worse. “I’m going to use my whole influence to make sure this country stays skeptical on migration and has a deterrent capacity that it only uses selectively,” Karp said.
Note: Listen to an audio clip of Jeffrey Epstein promoting Palantir to Ehud Barak. Read how Palantir helped the NSA spy on the entire planet. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.
Jeffrey Epstein appears to have been googling himself regularly. We see Epstein shoot off emails to associates, complaining that his digital footprint includes factual information about his crimes. Epstein regularly directed his gripes at Al Seckel, a fixer type who appears over and over in Epstein files and promises to bury news articles and other content that mentions his abuse. SEO consultants, contacts in the sciences, and even unrelated acquaintances helped to obscure Epstein’s past. In October 2010, Seckel laid out an overview of the group’s plan of attack to defend Epstein’s reputation online. The situation, as Seckel described it, was that a search surfaced “over 75+ pages of derogatory material,” and that someone would be “very hard pressed to find any ‘positive’ references.” To “balance the only one-sided negative opinion that has been spread over a wide birth on the Internet,” Seckel said, the team would need to flood the zone with content they can control, specifically pointing to spinning up websites with original content related to Epstein’s connections to science and charities. A “Phillipine Crew” ... would spread flattering links around the web, and other tasks. Part of how Google decides which pages to rank highly in search results is by looking at whether other sites link to a page; Epstein’s camp appears to have been trying to push down negative search results by securing valuable links from outside entities.
Note: Another email shows Al Seckel reporting to Jeffrey Epstein that they have successfully manipulated Google search results to bury negative news articles about Epstein, making it difficult to find information about him, even when searching terms like "pedophile." Read our latest in-depth Epstein files investigation, titled "Beyond Sex Trafficking—Zorro Ranch and a Darker Scientific Agenda." For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Jeffrey Epstein's crime ring and Big Tech.
In October 2011, years after Epstein pleaded guilty to sexual misconduct with a minor, an adviser to Bill Gates named Boris Nikolic emailed Epstein about wanting to introduce him to a “cool guy.” The message included a link to the Wikipedia page for 4chan founder Christopher Poole (who also goes by “moot”). Poole oversaw the platform until 2015. Four days later, Epstein responded to Nikolic about his meeting with Poole to say, “i liked mmot slot. i drove him home, he is very bright.” The timing of the introduction is interesting. The same month that Nikolic introduced Epstein to Poole, 4chan launched a politically oriented forum called /pol/, which became popular with right-wing extremists. The site eventually became a cesspool of far-right extremism, violent rhetoric and propaganda, and incubated the pro-Trump conspiracy theory known as QAnon. Four days after Epstein met with Poole, Nikolic emailed Epstein again with a comment on 4chan’s potential. “This article describes why I find moot interesting. The potential for manipulation is huge,” Nikolic wrote, linking to a Washington Post article that discussed how 4chan had been used to foment bigotry, launch cyberattacks and fuel a “hive mind” mentality. Poole’s name appears in Epstein emails later as well, including the next month, when Poole coordinates with one of Epstein’s subordinates about meeting up in New York. “Chris, Jeffrey has also said to feel free to bring anyone you think is clever!” the email reads.
Note: QAnon originally launched on 4chan's /pol/ board in October 2017. Read our latest in-depth Epstein files investigation, titled "Beyond Sex Trafficking—Zorro Ranch and a Darker Scientific Agenda," which investigates Epstein's deep ties to the scientific elite and their active exploration of eugenics, designer babies, human cloning, social engineering, and other human experimentation practices. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Jeffrey Epstein's crime ring and Big Tech.
On July 31, 2019, just eleven days before Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in a Manhattan jail cell, his connection to the Rothschild banking dynasty became the subject of major public controversy. Anonymous sources informed Bloomberg of a 2015 visit to Epstein’s New York mansion by baroness Ariane de Rothschild, the CEO of Edmond de Rothschild Group, a storied private bank and one of the largest Swiss financial institutions by assets under management. Newly released documents reveal that Epstein and de Rothschild’s personal relationship was much closer than the bank previously acknowledged. According to emails released by the U.S. House Oversight Committee on November 12, Epstein planned to see a Broadway play with de Rothschild in January 2014, and scheduled a private trip with her to Montreal. A second set of documents—the leaked inbox of former Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak ... sheds light on Epstein’s efforts to leverage his personal friendship with de Rothschild to raise funds for the development of Israeli cyberweapons. It’s not clear whether the Rothschild bank ultimately participated directly in Epstein and Barak’s cyberweapons efforts—but in October 2015, de Rothschild negotiated a $25 million contract with Epstein’s Southern Trust Company, the same entity Epstein used to fund Barak’s intelligence-linked security startup Reporty Homeland Security (now known as Carbyne) earlier that year.
Note: Read more about the vast influence of the Rothschild empire. Israeli cyberweapons have been sold to the FBI and used against journalists and activists. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Jeffrey Epstein's crime ring.
Newly surfaced audio recordings appear to capture Jeffrey Epstein advising former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak on the tech company Palantir, raising fresh questions about Epstein's global intelligence connections and influence. The recordings feature Epstein attempting to introduce Barak to Peter Thiel, Palantir's billionaire co-founder, describing the company and its potential board positions. Epstein's pitch highlighted the influence of major venture capital firms, including Andreessen Horowitz, positioning himself as the connector for powerful business and intelligence networks. Barak, a former head of Israeli military intelligence, later founded a security company reportedly invested in by Epstein, further fueling speculation about Epstein's ties to intelligence operations. Analysts note that Epstein's discussions with Barak blend technology advisory with geopolitical reach, suggesting that Palantir's capabilities may have been leveraged as part of broader influence operations. Previously released documents indicate he filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with the CIA in 1999 and again in 2011, seemingly seeking acknowledgement of past affiliations. Additional FBI reports, now partially confirmed by the recordings, describe Epstein as a confidential human source with ties to both US and allied intelligence services. Conversations with Alan Dershowitz reportedly involved debriefs with Mossad.
Note: Read our latest in-depth Epstein files investigation, titled "Beyond Sex Trafficking—Zorro Ranch and a Darker Scientific Agenda." Listen to the audio clip of Jeffrey Epstein promoting Palantir to Ehud Barak. Read how Palantir helped the NSA spy on the entire planet. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Jeffrey Epstein's crime ring and intelligence agency corruption.
A confidential informant told the FBI in 2017 that Jeffrey Epstein had a “personal hacker,” according to a document released by the Department of Justice on Friday. The document, which was released as part of the Justice Department’s legally required effort to publish documents related to its investigation into the late sex offender, does not identify who the alleged hacker was, but does include several details about them. According to the informant, the hacker was an Italian born in the southern region of Calabria and specialized in finding vulnerabilities in iOS, BlackBerry devices, and the Firefox browser. The hacker allegedly developed zero-day exploits and offensive cyber tools and sold them to several countries, including an unnamed central African government, the U.K., and the United States. The informant told the FBI that Epstein’s hacker sold a zero-day to Hezbollah, which paid him with “a trunk of cash.” Per the informant, the hacker “was very good at finding vulnerabilities.” It’s important to note that this document contains allegations from only the informant, not from the FBI directly, so it’s unclear how trustworthy the information and allegations are.
Note: A zero-day hack is when attackers secretly exploit a software flaw before the company even knows the flaw exists or has time to fix it. Don't miss Part 1 and Part 2 of our in-depth investigative series on this massive elite crime ring now coming to light in the documents being made public. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Jeffrey Epstein's trafficking ring.
The 2018 legalization of sports betting gave rise to a host of apps making it ever easier to gamble on games. Kalshi and Polymarket offer that service, but also much more. They’ll take your bets, for instance, on the presidential and midterm elections, the next Israeli bombing campaign, or whether Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg will get divorced. Tarek Mansour, the CEO of Kalshi, laid it out simply at a conference held by Citadel Securities in October. “The long-term vision,” Mansour said, “is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.” It’s as dystopian as it sounds. Betting apps have at times delivered better accuracy than polling results. For example, while pollsters clocked last year’s presidential race as deadlocked in the days before the election, Polymarket gave Trump an edge at 58 percent. But whether they are consistently better is a whole other story. Consider the 2022 midterm elections: Up until election night, the major prediction markets “failed spectacularly” and “projected outcomes for key races that turned out to be completely wrong,” according to one expert analysis. Prediction markets are also more prone to manipulation than they’d have you believe. And this can give deep-pocketed political actors another vessel for information warfare. Kalshi was even embroiled in a legal battle with federal regulators as recently as this summer for this very reason.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and financial industry corruption.
The American weapons maker Anduril ... is partnering with EDGE Group, a weapons conglomerate controlled by the United Arab Emirates, a nation run entirely by the royal families of its seven emirates that permits virtually none of the activities typically associated with democratic societies. In the UAE, free expression and association are outlawed, and dissident speech is routinely and brutally punished without due process. A 2024 assessment of political rights and civil liberties by Freedom House, a U.S. State Department-backed think tank, gave the UAE a score of 18 out of 100. The EDGE–Anduril Production Alliance, as it will be known, will focus on autonomous weapons systems, including the production of Anduril’s “Omen” drone. The UAE has agreed to purchase the first 50 Omen drones built through the partnership. EDGE Chair Faisal Al Bannai explained in a 2019 interview that EDGE was working to develop weapons systems tailored to defeating low-tech “militia-style” militant groups. Nathaniel Raymonds, who leads the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health ... argued that “not since Operation Cyclone,” the CIA effort to arm the Afghan mujahideen, “has there been a covert action by any nation state to arm a paramilitary proxy group at this scale and sophistication and try to write it off as just a series of happy coincidences.”
Note: For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on war.
Powerful tools that collect and aggregate data, enable facial recognition, and increase surveillance have become a bedrock of American policing over the past two decades. In collaboration with private technology companies, law enforcement agencies at all levels have experimented with how to implement these tools and created a large consumer market for them. Against this backdrop, it is essential to understand the role of the tech industry in both increasing the reach of local law enforcement and enabling mass deportations by the Trump administration. ICE is, for example, one of the largest customers for Clearview AI, a facial recognition company that has scraped more than 30 billion faces from internet sources. Data brokers, including one owned jointly by several airline companies, are actively selling data to ICE and other federal agencies. One of the most troubling recent developments in police data is that it captures information about all people. This “dragnet” approach to data collection is designed to give law enforcement maximum access to the entire population, transforming all personal information into potential evidence. Increasingly, law enforcement agencies are opting to purchase this data rather than collect it themselves, exploiting a loophole in Fourth Amendment legal protections. Some police departments have begun pressuring people into providing DNA samples at routine traffic stops, an attempt to expand their databases.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.
Trump loyalist and CIA contractor Larry Ellison’s purchase of CNN appears imminent, and marks the latest venture into media for the world’s second-richest individual. The world’s seven richest individuals are all now powerful media barons, controlling what the world sees, reads, and hears, marking a new chapter in oligarchical control over society and striking another blow at a free, independent press and diversity of opinion. In September, President Trump signed an executive order approving a proposal to force through the sale of social media platform TikTok to an American consortium led by Ellison-owned tech company, Oracle. Under the planned arrangement, Oracle will oversee the platform’s security and operations, giving the world’s second-richest man effective control over the platform that more than 60% of Americans under thirty years of age use for news and entertainment. No other period in history has seen such a rapid and overwhelming buy up of our means of communications by the billionaire class – a fact that raises tough questions about freedom of speech and diversity of opinion. Today, the world’s seven richest individuals are all major media barons, giving them extraordinary control over our media and public square, allowing them to set agendas, and suppress forms of speech they do not approve of. This includes criticisms of them and their holdings, the economic system we live under, and the actions of ... governments.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on financial inequality and media manipulation.
Children who spend more time on mobile phones, TVs, and video games may face a higher risk of developing attention problems as they grow, according to a first-of-its kind, large-scale study. The findings, recently published in Translational Psychiatry ... indicate a link between longer screen time and more severe symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Researchers ... also found measurable, though subtle, brain abnormalities among heavy screen users. Longer screen time at ages 9–10 predicted higher ADHD symptoms two years later. Higher screen time was linked to a smaller cortex, the outer layer of the brain responsible for higher-level thinking and attention. Children with more screen time at the outset had a smaller right putamen, a region involved in language learning, addiction, and reward processing. Heavier screen use after two years was tied to slightly thinner development in three other cortical regions that support important cognitive functions, such as attention, working memory, and language processing. Screen use has increased worldwide among children and adolescents, with more than one-third of U.S. parents of a child under 12 reporting their children began interacting with a smartphone before the age of 5. While digital devices are promoted as essential tools for school and social connection, their excessive use has been tied to disrupted sleep, reduced physical activity and negative impacts on mental health.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and mental health.
OpenAI has announced that ChatGPT will soon allow erotic and sexually explicit interactions for adult users. Erotic features aren’t just another product update; they deepen emotional dependency and encourage people to treat AI companions as partners rather than tools. This shift opens the door to what I call “intimate advertising” — a powerful new form of manipulation in which tech companies shape human desire and manipulate users for profit. AI has continual access to our anxieties, frustrations, desires, and secrets. It can understand how our minds work and detect when we are most vulnerable — and, therefore, most persuadable. What is particularly troubling is that this new form of advertising will come from entities that many will consider friends and life advisors. AI companion apps have been downloaded over 220 million times worldwide and are used regularly by over half of US teens. With intimate advertising, personal companionship becomes inseparable from businesses’ persuasion techniques. A system designed to comfort you can easily be repurposed to sell to you. The deeper AI companions embed themselves in our emotional lives, the more vital it becomes to draw a clear line between care and commerce. Before Big Tech turns intimacy into its most profitable advertising channel yet, we must press regulators to enforce the idea there are limits on how far we are willing to let AI into our private lives.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and the disappearance of privacy.
2025 has given Americans plenty to protest about. But as news cameras showed protesters filling streets of cities across the country, law enforcement officers—including U.S. Border Patrol agents—were quietly watching those same streets through different lenses: Flock Safety automated license plate readers (ALPRs) that tracked every passing car. Through an analysis of 10 months of nationwide searches on Flock Safety's servers, we discovered that more than 50 federal, state, and local agencies ran hundreds of searches through Flock's national network of surveillance data in connection with protest activity. In some cases, law enforcement specifically targeted known activist groups, demonstrating how mass surveillance technology increasingly threatens our freedom to demonstrate. Via public records requests, EFF obtained datasets representing more than 12 million searches logged by more than 3,900 agencies between December 2024 and October 2025. The data shows that agencies logged hundreds of searches related to the 50501 protests in February, the Hands Off protests in April, the No Kings protests in June and October, and other protests in between. Some agencies have adopted policies that prohibit using ALPRs for monitoring activities protected by the First Amendment. Yet many officers probed the nationwide network with terms like "protest" without articulating an actual crime under investigation.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on police corruption and the erosion of civil liberties.
In his 1963 scifi story “The Invincible,” the Polish writer Stanisaw Lem imagined an artificial species of free-floating nanobots which roamed the atmosphere of a far-off planet. Like tiny bugs, the microscopic beings were powerless alone, but together they could form cooperative swarms to gather energy, reproduce, and ultimately defend their territory from predators with deadly force. Lem probably never imagined his evolutionary parable of living dust was just a few decades from becoming a reality — or that it would become the inspiration for the development of a real-life military technology known as “smart dust.” Starting out as a theoretical research proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) ... smart dust is now being developed for use in a wide variety of industries, from environmental studies to commercial mining. That’s according to Interesting Engineering, which recently published a rundown of the state of present-day smart dust after decades of development. Though “dust” remains a bit of a misnomer — it’s more like a bunch of tiny sensors capable of delaying data to a central device — there’s a large body of theoretical and simulated work laying a path for practical microengineering that’s steadily coming into its own. In the future, [smart dust is] hoped to be able to report a near-infinite amount of data in suspended, 3D environments. The current “smart dust industry” ... was valued at around $115 million in 2022.
Note: Smart dust can theoretically be used to spy on human thought. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.
AI could mean fewer body bags on the battlefield — but that's exactly what terrifies the godfather of AI. Geoffrey Hinton, the computer scientist known as the "godfather of AI," said the rise of killer robots won't make wars safer. It will make conflicts easier to start by lowering the human and political cost of fighting. Hinton said ... that "lethal autonomous weapons, that is weapons that decide by themselves who to kill or maim, are a big advantage if a rich country wants to invade a poor country." "The thing that stops rich countries invading poor countries is their citizens coming back in body bags," he said. "If you have lethal autonomous weapons, instead of dead people coming back, you'll get dead robots coming back." That shift could embolden governments to start wars — and enrich defense contractors in the process, he said. Hinton also said AI is already reshaping the battlefield. "It's fairly clear it's already transformed warfare," he said, pointing to Ukraine as an example. "A $500 drone can now destroy a multimillion-dollar tank." Traditional hardware is beginning to look outdated, he added. "Fighter jets with people in them are a silly idea now," Hinton said. "If you can have AI in them, AIs can withstand much bigger accelerations — and you don't have to worry so much about loss of life." One Ukrainian soldier who works with drones and uncrewed systems [said] in a February report that "what we're doing in Ukraine will define warfare for the next decade."
Note: As law expert Dr. Salah Sharief put it, "The detached nature of drone warfare has anonymized and dehumanized the enemy, greatly diminishing the necessary psychological barriers of killing." For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and warfare technology.
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