BRUSSELS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 19, 2023--

Close to 80 students, mostly girls, in two primary schools are suspected to have been poisoned over the weekend and taken to hospital in Afghanistan's Sang Charak district, Mohammad Rahmani, the head of Education Department in the northern Sar-i-Pul province, told CNN.

The five day week could soon be completely obsolete, if Bill Gates is to be believed. The Microsoft founder thinks that one of the results of AI will be the possibility of three day weeks becoming attainable for many people. While there are plenty of fears about the impact AI will have on the world economy and the potential dangers it poses to society, Gates believes it could mean humans ultimately have to do a lot less work to get by. Gates spoke on Trevor Noah’s What Now? podcast and the conversation turned to the possibilities that come hand in hand with AI. "If you eventually get a society where you only have to work three days a week, that's probably OK," he said. The billionaire also said that we could get to the stage where people can work fewer days to earn a living wage, as they co-exist in a world where "machines can make all the food and the stuff”. It’s not all positive, though. Gates previously warned about the dangers of AI in a blog over the summer. He wrote: "I don't think AI's impact will be as dramatic as the Industrial Revolution, but it certainly will be as big as the introduction of the PC. Word processing applications didn't do away with office work, but they changed it forever. Employers and employees had to adapt, and they did." Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter How to join the indy100's free WhatsApp channel 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

Standard Life has confirmed plans to create a commercial pensions dashboard, to help its four million customers have greater awareness around their retirement savings. It has partnered with financial technology company Moneyhub to deliver the dashboard, which will eventually be embedded into Standard Life’s existing customer app. The pensions dashboard will also be available to customers through Standard Life’s online desktop. We are excited to extend our collaboration with Moneyhub to develop and launch one of the UK’s first fully functional commercial pensions dashboards Gail Izat, Standard Life Standard Life said the initiative would help customers to find and view their state, workplace and personal pensions. Work has been under way within the pensions industry for several years to develop pensions dashboards, where people will be able to see their pension savings online, in one place. In June, pensions minister Laura Trott said the Government remained “as committed as ever” to making pensions dashboards a reality. The Government previously said more time was needed for the complex build of pensions dashboards to be set up. Standard Life said it was putting “the building blocks in place” so that it could be ready to hit the ground running with its dashboard, adding that the timeline for its delivery was dependent on the Government programme. The Government’s pensions dashboards programme has been urging providers to continue with their plans and Standard Life has seized the initiative Samantha Seaton, Moneyhub The pension provider added that it had been preparing to finalise plans so that it would be ready for launch when the Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) regulatory approval process was in place. As well as finding and viewing pension data, Standard Life said its pension scheme members would be able to go further by connecting to and seeing their bank accounts, credit cards, savings, property valuations, Isas, loans, mortgages, and other financial products, in one place. Standard Life’s parent company, Phoenix Group, anticipates extending dashboard access to all of its 12 million UK customers “in due course”. Gail Izat, managing director of workplace at Standard Life, said: “It may seem obvious but simply knowing how much all your pensions are worth will allow you to plan for the future and understand what you can do today to have enough money to allow you to live your desired lifestyle later in life. Pensions dashboards will transform the way people plan for retirement. We remain committed to their delivery Department for Work and Pensions “We are excited to extend our collaboration with Moneyhub to develop and launch one of the UK’s first fully functional commercial pensions dashboards, while leading the way in shaping the future of retirement saving by giving customers greater certainty and a truly holistic view of their finances.” Samantha Seaton, chief executive of Moneyhub, said: “The Government’s pensions dashboards programme has been urging providers to continue with their plans and Standard Life has seized the initiative.” A Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) spokesperson said: “Pensions dashboards will transform the way people plan for retirement. “We remain committed to their delivery and to working closely with the pensions industry to ensure the record number of people saving for retirement have the support they need to make informed choices about their financial futures.” Read More Charity boss speaks out over ‘traumatic’ encounter with royal aide Ukraine war’s heaviest fight rages in east - follow live BBC reviews Russell Brand’s time at corporation as YouTube demonetises content BBC removes some Russell Brand content as monetisation suspended on YouTube How does Russell Brand make money online?

Apple is expected to debut its iPhone 15 lineup at the company's annual September keynote event on Tuesday, and it could introduce the biggest change to the phone's design in 11 years.

The iPhone is a device that redefined the term "cell phone." With about 1.2 billion active devices out in the world, Apple's trademark product created a revolution in the mobile phone industry, marking a shift away from the flip phones and keyboards of the past toward a future full of larger touch screens and powerful cameras.

The Fortnite Break the Curse Quests are now live with Jujutsu Kaisen challenges and rewards that require players to use new Cursed Techniques.

Spotify Technology SA said on Monday it would lay off 200 employees in its podcast division, representing about

Online privacy is a major concern for everyone, and by far the biggest personal privacy

For a brief moment last month, an image purporting to show an explosion near the Pentagon spread on social media, causing panic and a market sell-off. The image, which bore all the hallmarks of being generated by AI, was later debunked by authorities.

It started like any other outage: unexplained error messages that told users they had hit their “rate limit”, and Twitter posts refusing to load. But as the weekend progressed, it became clear that these weren’t just any old technical problems, but rather issues that could define the future not only of Twitter but of the internet. Elon Musk took to Twitter on Saturday and announced that he would be introducing a range of changes “to address extreme levels of data scraping [and] system manipulation”. Users would only be able to see a limited number of posts, and those who are not logged in wouldn’t be able to see the site at all. That decision triggered those error messages, since users were hitting the “rate limit” that meant they were requesting too many posts for Twitter to be able to handle. The new limits – apparently temporary, though still in effect – meant that users were being rationed on how many tweets they were able to see, and would see frustrating and unexplained messages when they actually hit that limit. In many ways it was yet another perplexing and worrying decision by Mr Musk, whose stewardship of Twitter has lurched from scandal to scandal since he took over the company in October last year. (He appointed a chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, last month, but is still seemingly deciding, executing and communicating the company’s strategy.) But something seems different about the chaos this time around. For one, it is not one of the many content policy issues or potentially hostile ways of encouraging people to sign up for Twitter’s premium service that have marked Mr Musk’s leadership of Twitter so far; for another, it seemed to be part of a broader issue that is rattling the whole internet, and which Twitter might only be one symptom. It remains unclear whether Mr Musk’s latest decision really has anything to do with scraping by artificial intelligence systems, as he claimed. But the explanation certainly makes sense: AI systems require vast corpuses of text and images to be trained on, and the companies that make them have generated that by scraping and regurgitating the text that can be easily found across the web. Every time someone wants to load a web page, their computer makes a request to that company’s servers, which then provide the data that can be reconstructed on the user’s web browser. If you want to load Elon Musk’s Twitter account, for instance, you direct your browser to the relevant address and it will show his Twitter posts, pulled down from the internet. That comes with costs, of course, including the price of running those servers and the bandwidth required to be sending vast amounts of data quickly across the internet. For the most part on the modern internet, that cost has been covered by also sending along some advertising, or requiring that people sign up for a subscription to see the content they are asking for. AI companies that are scraping those sites make frequent requests for that data, however, and quickly. And since the system is automated, they are not able to look at ads or pay for subscriptions, meaning that companies are not paid for the content they are providing. That issue looks to be growing across the internet. Companies that host text discussions, such as Twitter, are very aware that they might be serving up the same data that could one day render them obsolete, and are keen to at least make some money from that process. It also looks to be some of the reason behind the recent fallout on Reddit, too. That site is especially useful for feeding to an AI – it includes very human and very helpful answers to the kinds of questions that users might ask an AI system – and the company is very aware that it is, once again, giving up the information that might also be used to overtake it. To try and solve that, it recently announced that it would be charging large amounts of access to its API, which serves as the interface through which automated systems can hoover up that data. It was at least partly intended as a way to generate money from those AI companies, though it also had the effect of making it too expensive for third-party Reddit clients – which also rely on that API – to keep running, and the most popular ones have since shut down. There is good reason to think that this will keep happening. The web is increasingly being hoovered up by the same AI systems that will eventually be used to further degrade the experience of using it: Twitter is, in effect, being used to train the same bots that will one day post misleading and annoying messages all over Twitter. Every website that hosts text, images or video could face the same problems, as AI companies look to build up their datasets and train up their systems. As such, all of the internet could become more like Mr Musk’s Twitter did over the weekend: actively hostile to actual users, as it attempts to keep the fake users away. But just as likely is that it is Mr Musk’s explanation for why the site went down conveniently chimes with the zeitgeist, and helpfully shifts blame to the AI companies that he has already voiced significant skepticism about. The truth may be that Twitter – which has fired the vast majority of its staff, including those in its engineering teams – might finally be running into problems with infrastructure that happen when fewer people are around to keep the site online. Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, is perhaps the best qualified person to suggest that is the case. He said that Mr Musk’s argument for the new limits “doesn’t pass the sniff test” and instead suggested that it was the result of someone mistakenly breaking the rate limiter and then having that accident passed off by Mr Musk as being intentional, whether he knows that or not. “For anyone keeping track, this isn’t even the first time they’ve completely broken the site by bumbling around in the rate limiter,” Mr Roth wrote on Twitter rival Bluesky. “There’s a reason the limiter was one of the most locked down internal tools. Futzing around with rate limits is probably the easiest way to break Twitter.” Mr Roth also said that Twitter has long been aware that it was being scraped – and that it was OK with it. He called it the “open secret of Twitter data access” and said the company considered it “fine”. And he too suggested that the events of the weekend could be a hint about what is coming to the internet, offering an entirely different alternative. It’s not Twitter, Reddit and other companies who should really be upset about what is going on, he suggested. “There’s some legitimacy to Twitter and Reddit being upset with AI companies for slurping up social data gratis in order to train commercially lucrative models,” Mr Roth said. “But they should never forget that it’s not *their* data — it’s ours. A solution to parasitic AI needs to be user-centric, not profit-centric.” Read More Twitter to stop TweetDeck access for unverified users Meta’s Twitter alternative Threads to be launched this week – report Twitter rival Bluesky halts sign-ups after huge surge in demand Twitter is breaking more and more Twitter rival sees huge increase in users as Elon Musk ‘destroys his site’ What does Twitter’s rate-limiting restriction mean?

Chipotle’s ‘Autocado’ takes the drudgery out of making guacamole.