In the beginning there was only one. It looked like an aluminum beach ball with four car antennas sticking out. Stuffed with radio transmitters, history’s first human-made satellite emitted a spectral beeping signal from its solitary orbit for just three weeks before its batteries died. That was enough to terrify …

Parenting in 2023 requires talking with your kids not just about the hazards of the internet and social media but also the artificial intelligence spreading rapidly into just about every app or online service. Common Sense Media, the nonprofit that rates movies and other media for parents, is trying to …

The White House issued draft rules today that would require federal agencies to evaluate and constantly monitor algorithms used in health care, law enforcement, and housing for potential discrimination or other harmful effects on human rights. Once in effect, the rules could force changes in US government activity dependent on …

Joe Biden wants the US government to make wider use of artificial intelligence—and to keep commercial AI on a tighter leash. Those are two prominent themes of a sprawling executive order Biden will sign today, which issues dozens of directives for federal agencies to complete within the next year, on …

Deadly bioweapons, automated cybersecurity attacks, powerful AI models escaping human control. Those are just some of the potential threats posed by artificial intelligence, according to a new UK government report. It was released to help set the agenda for an international summit on AI safety to be hosted by the …

As the US federal government struggles to meaningfully regulate AI—or even function—New York City is stepping into the governance gap. The city introduced an AI Action Plan this week that mayor Eric Adams calls a first of its kind in the nation. The set of roughly 40 policy initiatives is …

robots have been depicted in movies for more than a century, but the anxieties about artificial intelligence that they used to convey are no longer theoretical. There’s a bill in US Congress right now to stop AI from gaining control of nuclear weapons, and roughly a dozen militaries around the …

Meta is introducing a virtual assistant today to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT that can serve up answers to questions from Microsoft’s Bing search engine and generate images from text commands. Meta AI, as the assistant is called, is powered by the company’s large language model Llama 2. As well as chatting …

Nearly 1,500 US police departments operate drones but only about a dozen routinely dispatch them in response to 911 calls, according to ACLU research. Drone maker Skydio aims to see that change, with a new model launched last week called the X10. The goal, cofounder and CEO Adam Bry said …

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has done tens of thousands of face recognition searches using software from outside providers in recent years. Yet only 5 percent of the 200 agents with access to the technology have taken the bureau’s three-day training course on how to use it, a …