Tesla titan and multi-billionaire Elon Musk has reportedly warned US senators at a private meeting that unregulated artificial intelligence technology poses a “civilisational risk” to society. Senate majority leader Chuch Schumer convened a meeting of the most prominent tech executives in the US to help pass a bipartisan legislation encouraging both the rapid development of AI technology and also mitigating its biggest risks. The closed-door meeting was attended by some of the tech industry’s biggest names, including Tesla and SpaceX boss Mr Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, former Microsoft chief Bill Gates, Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, as well as OpenAI founder Sam Altman. As Mr Musk left the Capitol building following several hours of the meeting, he told reporters that “we have to be proactive rather than reactive” in regulating AI as its consequences of going wrong are “severe”. “The question is really one of civilizational risk. It’s not like … one group of humans versus another. It’s like, hey, this is something that’s potentially risky for all humans everywhere,” he said, according to NBC News. Mr Musk also reportedly called for a government AI agency, similar to the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Federal Aviation Administration to oversee developments in the sector and ensure safety. Leaders in the tech industry also called for a balanced approach towards regulating AI. In his prepared remarks, Mr Zuckerberg said the two defining issues for AI are “safety and access”, adding that the US Congress should “engage with AI to support innovation and safeguards”. “New technology often brings new challenges, and it’s on companies to make sure we build and deploy products responsibly,” the Meta chief said. “This is an emerging technology, there are important equities to balance here, and the government is ultimately responsible for that,” he added. The Facebook founder called for policymakers, academics, civil society and industry to work together to minimise the potential risks of AI, but also to maximise its potential benefits. Some of the measures he suggested for building safeguards into AI systems included “selecting the data to train with, extensively red-teaming internally and externally to identify and fix issues, fine-tuning the models for alignment, and partnering with safety-minded cloud providers to add additional filters to the systems we release”. As lawmakers at the US Capitol Hill interacted with tech giant chiefs about potential AI regulations, companies including Microsoft, OpenAI, Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon were also being probed on the conditions of the workers behind tools like ChatGPT, Bing, and Bard. Lawmakers are reportedly probing the working conditions of data labelers who are tasked by companies, often at outsourced firms, to label data used to train AI and for rating chatbot responses. “Despite the essential nature of this work, millions of data workers around the world perform these stressful tasks under constant surveillance, with low wages and no benefits,” lawmakers, including Elizabeth Warren and Edward Markey, said in a letter to tech executives. “These conditions not only harm the workers, they also risk the quality of the AI systems –potentially undermining accuracy, introducing bias, and jeopardizing data protection,” they said. Read More Elon Musk was on brink of death after catching malaria on South African safari, book claims Fatherhood, rows with Amber Heard and ‘the woke mind virus’: 6 big revelations from Elon Musk’s biography Putin praises Musk as ‘outstanding person’ days after report Tesla boss stopped Ukrainian attack Long-form video content is here to stay, says YouTube UK boss Cybertruck sparked Tesla revolt that saw secret design plan, Musk biography reveals Everything Apple killed off at iPhone 15 event

Andrew Forrest, the Australian billionaire betting much of the fortune he made in iron-ore mining on green power,

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COLLEGE PARK, Md. & SEOUL, South Korea--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 29, 2023--

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug 16, 2023--

Roblox arrives today on Sony consoles. Players wonder if the PS version will include cross-progression and cross-platform play like the PC, mobile, and Xbox versions.

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Elon Musk wants to turn Twitter into a “digital town square,” but his much-hyped Twitter Spaces kickoff event, with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announcing his run for president, struggled with technical glitches and a near half-hour delay Tuesday

By Kate Abnett BRUSSELS Southern Europe is bracing for a summer of ferocious drought, with some regions already

Space is full of mysteries which we will never likely solve but, generally, we at least know a thing or two about craft we send out into the cosmos. Not so, when it comes to one probe which has just touched back down on Earth after 276 days in orbit. The experimental spacecraft was launched by China’s space agency, ostensibly to test the nation’s reusable space technologies. According to state media agency Xinhua News, the mission’s aim was to help with the development of “more convenient and affordable round-trip methods for the peaceful use of space in the future”. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter That all sounds pretty similar to what SpaceX and NASA are up to, except that the Chinese spacecraft and its journey have been shrouded in secrecy. No information has been released on the altitude it reached or the systems it tested. We don’t even know where it went or, indeed, what kind of spacecraft it was – not a single image has been released to the public. Commentators on Chinese social media have speculated that Beijing has been developing a spacecraft like the UAir Force's X-37B, an autonomous spaceplane that can remain in orbit for years. However, no one knows how well this is going nor, indeed, if it’s going at all. All we do know about China’s latest unidentified flying object is that it was launched from the Jiquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert on August 5, 2022 and returned to the same site on 8 May, 2023. It follows an earlier mission, carried out in July last year, which saw a Chinese spacecraft fly to the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere and back on the same day. The country’s main space contractor, China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp (CASC), hailed the success of the craft’s brief celestial jaunt at the time. It gushed: "The development of reusable space transportation technology is an important symbol of China's transition from a 'big' space-faring nation to a 'powerful' space-faring one.” Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Scientists who were attempting to map an abandoned ant hill didn't expect to find a mega-city when they shot the hill full of cement, but that's exactly what they discovered. Over three days, scientists pumped 10 tons of cement into the empty ant hill to map its networks. After the cement dried, they dug for weeks around it. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter The excavation revealed an incredibly impressive, intricate, and bizarre ant mega-city. The mega-city was a truly colossal undertaking. A video revealed that the ants created the structure by displacing 40 tons of dirt. And it really is a mega-city. The ants networked to disposal pits and fungus gardens. Each tunnel was designed to ensure thorough ventilation and reduce transport time. The narrator disclosed the truth. That despite the complex nature of the mega-city, there was no single architect of any - but it was down to the collective will of the colony. "Everything looks like it has been designed by an architect a single mind but of course, that isn’t true," they said. "This colossal and complex city was created by the collective will of the ant colony, the super organism." The short resurfaced clip is from a much longer piece called Ants! Nature’s Secret Power. You can watch the full documentary here. Our city designers should take a few notes. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.