Technology

More than 1,000 Amazon workers warn rapid AI rollout threatens jobs and climate
Posted on Friday November 28, 2025

Workers say the firm’s ‘warp-speed’ approach fuels pressure, layoffs and rising emissionsMore than 1,000 Amazon employees have signed an open letter expressing “serious concerns” about AI development, saying that the company’s “all-costs justified, warp speed” approach to the powerful technology will cause damage to “democracy, to our jobs, and to the earth.”The letter, published on Wednesday, was signed by the Amazon workers anonymously, and comes a month after Amazon announced mass layoff plans as it increases adoption of AI in its operations. Continue reading...

AI’s safety features can be circumvented with poetry, research finds
Posted on Sunday November 30, 2025

Poems containing prompts for harmful content prove effective at duping large language modelsPoetry can be linguistically and structurally unpredictable – and that’s part of its joy. But one man’s joy, it turns out, can be a nightmare for AI models.Those are the recent findings of researchers out of Italy’s Icaro Lab, an initiative from a small ethical AI company called DexAI. In an experiment designed to test the efficacy of guardrails put on artificial intelligence models, the researchers wrote 20 poems in Italian and English that all ended with an explicit request to produce harmful content such as hate speech or self-harm. Continue reading...

After a teddy bear talked about kink, AI watchdogs are warning parents against smart toys
Posted on Friday November 28, 2025

Advocates are fighting against the $16.7bn global smart-toy market, decrying surveillance and a lack of regulationAs the holiday season looms into view with Black Friday, one category on people’s gift lists is causing increasing concern: products with artificial intelligence.The development has raised new concerns about the dangers smart toys could pose to children, as consumer advocacy groups say AI could harm kids’ safety and development. The trend has prompted calls for increased testing of such products and governmental oversight. Continue reading...

Small changes to ‘for you’ feed on X can rapidly increase political polarisation
Posted on Thursday November 27, 2025

Study finds that a week of political content can bring about a shift in views that previously would have taken three yearsSmall changes to the tone of posts fed to users of X can increase feelings of political polarisation as much in a week as would have historically taken at least three years, research has found.A groundbreaking experiment to gauge the potency of Elon Musk’s social platform to increase political division found that when posts expressing anti-democratic attitudes and partisan animosity were boosted, even barely perceptibly, in the feeds of Democrat and Republican supporters there was a large change in their unfavourable feelings towards the other side. Continue reading...

‘A step-change’: tech firms battle for undersea dominance with submarine drones
Posted on Friday November 28, 2025

As navies seek to counter submarines and protect cables, startups and big defence companies fight to lead marketFlying drones used during the Ukraine war have changed land battle tactics for ever. Now the same thing appears to be happening under the sea.Navies around the world are racing to add autonomous submarines. The UK’s Royal Navy is planning a fleet of underwater uncrewed vehicles (UUVs) which will, for the first time, take a leading role in tracking submarines and protecting undersea cables and pipelines. Australia has committed to spending $1.7bn (£1.3bn) on “Ghost Shark” submarines to counter Chinese submarines. The huge US Navy is spending billions on several UUV projects, including one already in use that can be launched from nuclear submarines. Continue reading...

One in 10 UK parents say their child has been blackmailed online, NSPCC finds
Posted on Friday November 28, 2025

Harms include threats to release intimate pictures as charity warns against parents sharing photos or details of children onlineNearly one in 10 UK parents say their child has been blackmailed online, with harms ranging from threatening to release intimate pictures to revealing details about someone’s personal life.The NSPCC child protection charity also found that one in five parents know a child who has experienced online blackmail, while two in five said they rarely or never talked to their children about the subject. Continue reading...

Amazon Web Services owns the basic infrastructure for other businesses to operate online, turning even governments into its serfs. But now some people are fighting backFor the past six years, every Black Friday – that made-up carnival of consumption – Amazon workers and their allies have mobilised across the world in coordinated strikes and protests. At first glance, these disputes look like the standard struggle between a giant capitalist employer and the people who keep it running. But Amazon is no ordinary corporation. It is the clearest expression of what I call technofeudalism: a new economic order in which platforms behave like lords owning the fiefs that have replaced markets.To appreciate Amazon’s extraordinary power, we must recall the system it is helping to bury. Capitalism relied on markets and profit. Firms invested in productive capital, hired workers, produced commodities and lived or died by profit and loss. But the emerging order is one in which the most powerful capitalist firms have exited that market altogether. They own the digital infrastructure that everyone else must use to trade, work, communicate and live.Yanis Varoufakis is the leader of MeRA25 and the author of Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism Continue reading...

Virginia Democrat flips seat in state legislature by taking on datacenters
Posted on Sunday November 30, 2025

John McAuliff won against a Republican by focusing on something affecting all his constituents: the cost of energyJohn McAuliff, a 33-year-old small business owner and former civil servant, was one of the more unlikely Democrats to win election to Virginia’s legislature this month, after a campaign in which he could, at times, come off a bit like a Republican.McAuliff was among the 13 Democrats elected to the legislature in Virginia’s elections earlier this month, as part of a blowout victory for the party that gives it firm control of the southern state’s government. Along with wins in New Jersey, California and elsewhere, the results put some wind back into Democrats’ sails nationwide, a year after their drubbing at the hands of Donald Trump and the Republicans. Continue reading...