Australia's world-first ban blocking under-16s from major social platforms has come into effect. The BBC is live reporting the reactions "both from within Australia and outside it." From the report: I've been speaking to 12-year-old Paloma, who lives in Sydney and says she is "sad" about the ban. She spends between 30 minutes and two hours a day on social media. "I'm upset... because I am part of several communities on Snapchat and TikTok," she tells me. "I've developed good friendships on the apps, with people in the US and New Zealand, who have common interests like gaming, and it makes me feel more connected to the world." Paloma says she regularly talks about the ups and downs of her life with a boy of the same age in New Jersey, in the US, who she knows through gaming and TikTok. "I feel like I can explore my creativity when I am in a community online with people of similar ages," she says. Everyone Paloma knows is "a bit annoyed" about the ban. By stopping them from using social media, she says "the government is taking away a part of ourselves." Two 15-year-olds, Noah Jones and Macy Neyland, backed by a rights group, are arguing at Australia's highest court that the legislation robs them of their right to free communication. The Digital Freedom Project (DFP) announced the case had been filed in the High Court late last month. After news of the case broke, Australia's Communications Minister Anika Wells told parliament the government would not be swayed. "We will not be intimidated by threats. We will not be intimidated by legal challenges. We will not be intimidated by big tech. On behalf of Australian parents, we will stand firm," she said.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Shares of Apple were battered earlier this year as the iPhone maker faced repeated complaints about its lack of an artificial intelligence strategy. But as the AI trade faces increasing scrutiny, that hesitance has gone from a weakness to a strength -- and it's showing up in the stock market. Through the first six months of 2025, Apple was the second-worst performer among the Magnificent Seven tech giants, as its shares tumbled 18% through the end of June. That has reversed since then, with the stock soaring 35%, while AI darlings like Meta Platforms and Microsoft slid into the red and even Nvidia underperformed. The S&P 500 Index rose 10% in that time, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 Index gained 13%. [...] As a result, Apple now has a $4.1 trillion market capitalization and the second biggest weight in the S&P 500, leaping over Microsoft and closing in on Nvidia. The shift reflects the market's questioning of the hundreds of billions of dollars Big Tech firms are throwing at AI development, as well as Apple's positioning to eventually benefit when the technology is ready for mass use. "It is remarkable how they have kept their heads and are in control of spending, when all of their peers have gone the other direction," said John Barr, portfolio manager of the Needham Aggressive Growth Fund. Bill Stone, chief investment officer at Glenview Trust Company, added: "While they most certainly will incorporate more AI into the phones over time, Apple has avoided the AI arms race and the massive capex that accompanies it." His company views Apple's stock as "a bit of an anti-AI holding."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology has formally retracted a sweeping scientific paper published in 2000 that became a key defense for Monsanto's claim that Roundup herbicide and its active ingredient glyphosate don't cause cancer. Martin van den Berg, the journal's editor in chief, said in a note accompanying the retraction that he had taken the step because of "serious ethical concerns regarding the independence and accountability of the authors of this article and the academic integrity of the carcinogenicity studies presented." The paper, titled Safety Evaluation and Risk Assessment of the Herbicide Roundup and Its Active Ingredient, Glyphosate, for Humans, concluded that Monsanto's glyphosate-based weed killers posed no health risks to humans -- no cancer risks, no reproductive risks, no adverse effects on development of endocrine systems in people or animals. Regulators around the world have cited the paper as evidence of the safety of glyphosate herbicides, including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in this assessment (PDF). [...] In explaining the decision to retract the 25-year-old research paper, Van den Berg wrote: "Concerns were raised regarding the authorship of this paper, validity of the research findings in the context of misrepresentation of the contributions by the authors and the study sponsor and potential conflicts of interest of the authors." He noted that the paper's conclusions regarding the carcinogenicity of glyphosate were solely based on unpublished studies from Monsanto, ignoring other outside, published research. "The retraction of this study is a long time coming," said Brent Wisner, one of the lead lawyers in the Roundup litigation and a key player in getting the internal documents revealed to the public. Wisner said the study was the "quintessential example of how companies like Monsanto could fundamentally undermine the peer-review process through ghostwriting, cherrypicking unpublished studies, and biased interpretations." "This garbage ghostwritten study finally got the fate it deserved,â Wisner added. "Hopefully, journals will now be more vigilant in protecting the impartiality of science on which so many people depend."

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Researchers and moderators are increasingly concerned that ChatGPT-style language is bleeding into everyday speech and writing. The topic has been explored in the past but "two new, more anecdotal reports, suggest that our chatbot dialect isn't just something that can be found through close analysis of data," reports Gizmodo. "It might be an obvious, every day fact of life now." Slashdot reader joshuark shares an excerpt from the report: Over on Reddit, according to a new Wired story by Kat Tenbarge, moderators of certain subreddits are complaining about AI posts ruining their online communities. It's not new to observe that AI-armed spammers post low-value engagement bait on social media, but these are spaces like r/AmItheAsshole, r/AmIOverreacting, and r/AmITheDevil, where visitors crave the scintillation or outright titillation of bona fide human misbehavior. If, behind the scenes, there's not really a grieving college student having her tuition cut off for randomly flying off the handle at her stepmom, there's no real fun to be had. The mods in the Wired story explain how they detect AI content, and unfortunately their methods boil down to "It's vibes." But one novel struggle in the war against slop, the mods say, is that not only are human-written posts sometimes rewritten by AI, but mods are concerned that humans are now writing like AI. Humans are becoming flesh and blood AI-text generators, muddying the waters of AI "detection" to the point of total opacity. As "Cassie" an r/AmItheAsshole moderator who only gave Wired her first name put it, "AI is trained off people, and people copy what they see other people doing." In other words, Cassie said, "People become more like AI, and AI becomes more like people." Meanwhile, essayist Sam Kriss just explored the weird way chatbots "write" for the latest issue of the New York Times Magazine, and he discovered along the way that humans have accidentally taken cues from that weirdness. After parsing chatbots' strange tics and tendencies -- such as overusing the word "delve" most likely because it's in a disproportional number of texts from Nigeria, where that word is popular -- Kriss refers to a previously reported trend from over the summer. Members of the U.K. Parliament were accused of using ChatGPT to write their speeches. The thinking goes that ChatGPT-written speeches contained the phrase "I rise to speak," an American phrase, used by American legislators. But Kriss notes that it's not just showing up from time to time. It's being used with downright breathtaking frequency. "On a single day this June, it happened 26 times," he notes. While 26 different MPs using ChatGPT to write speeches is not some scientific impossibility, it's more likely an example of chatbots, "smuggling cultural practices into places they don't belong," to quote Kriss again. So when Kriss points out that when Starbucks locations were closing in September, and signs posted on the doors contained tortured sentences like, "It's your coffeehouse, a place woven into your daily rhythm, where memories were made, and where meaningful connections with our partners grew over the years," one can't state with certainty that this is AI-generated text (although let's be honest: it probably is).

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Anthropic is bringing Claude Code directly into Slack, letting developers spin up coding sessions from chat threads and automate workflows without leaving the app. TechCrunch reports: Previously, developers could only get lightweight coding help via Claude in Slack -- like writing snippets, debugging, and explanations. Now they can tag @Claude to spin up a complete coding session using Slack context like bug reports or feature requests. Claude analyzes recent messages to determine the right repository, posts progress updates in threads, and shares links to review work and open pull requests. The move reflects a broader industry shift: AI coding assistants are migrating from IDEs (integrated development environment, where software development happens) into collaboration tools where teams already work. [...] While Anthropic has not yet confirmed when it would make a broader rollout available, the timing is strategic. The AI coding market is getting more competitive, and differentiation is starting to depend more on integration depth and distribution than model capability alone.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Since online genealogy services began operating, millions of people have sent them saliva samples in hopes of learning about their family roots and discovering far-flung relatives. These services also appeal to law enforcement authorities, who have used them to solve cold case murders and to investigate crimes like the 2022 killing of four University of Idaho students. Crime-scene DNA submitted to genealogy sites has helped investigators identify suspects and human remains by first identifying relatives. The use of public records and family-tree building is crucial to this technique, and its main tool has been the genealogy site Ancestry, which has vast amounts of individual DNA profiles and public records. More than 1,400 cases have been solved with the help of so-called genetic genealogy investigations, most of them with help from Ancestry. But a recent step taken by the site is now deterring many police agencies from employing this crime-solving technique. In August, Ancestry revised the terms and conditions on its site to make it clear that its services were off-limits "for law enforcement purposes" without a legal order or warrant, which can be hard to get, because of privacy concerns. This followed the addition last year to the terms and conditions that the services could not be used for "judicial proceedings." Investigators say the implications are dire and will result in crucial criminal cases slowing or stalling entirely, denying answers to grieving families. "Everyone who does this work has depended on the records database that Ancestry controls," said David Gurney, who runs Ramapo College's Investigative Genetic Genealogy Center in New Jersey. "Without it, casework is going to be a lot slower, and there will be some cases that can't be resolved at all."

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Europol's GRIMM taskforce has arrested nearly 200 people accused of running or participating in "violence-as-a-service" schemes where cybercrime groups recruit youth online for real-world attacks. "These individuals are groomed or coerced into committing a range of violent crimes, from acts of intimidation and torture to murder," the European police said on Monday. The Register reports: GRIMM began in April, and includes investigators from Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, the UK, plus Europol experts and online service providers. During its first six months, police involved in this operation arrested 63 people directly involved in carrying out or planning violent crimes, 40 "enablers" accused of facilitating violence-for-hire services, 84 recruiters, and six "instigators," five of whom the cops labeled "high-value targets." [...] Many of the criminals involved in recruiting and carrying out these violence-for-hire services are also members of The Com. This is a loosely knit gang, primarily English speakers, involved in several interconnected networks of hackers, SIM swappers, and extortionists. Their reach has spread across the Atlantic, and over the summer, the FBI warned that a subset of this cybercrime group, called In Real Life (IRL) Com, poses a growing threat to youth. The FBI's security bulletin specifically called out IRL Com subgroups that offer swat-for-hire services, in which hoaxers falsely report shootings at someone's residence or call in bomb threats to trigger massive armed police responses at the victims' homes.

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The Trump administration will allow Nvidia to resume selling H200 chips to China, but only if the U.S. government takes a 25% cut. Axios reports: Trump said on Truth Social that he'll allow Nvidia to sell H200 chips -- the generation of chips before its current, more-advanced Blackwell lineup -- to China, with the U.S. government pocketing a quarter of the revenue. He said he would apply "the same approach to AMD, Intel, and other GREAT American Companies." American defense hawks fear that China could use Nvidia chips to advance its military ambitions. Trump said Monday that the sales will be subject to "conditions that allow for continued strong National Security." The blockade remains in place for Nvidia's current generation of Blackwell chips, which will be replaced in the second half of 2026 by even more advanced Rubin chips. Huang said recently he was unsure if China would want the older chips. "We applaud President Trump's decision to allow America's chip industry to compete to support high paying jobs and manufacturing in America," Nvidia said in a statement. "Offering H200 to approved commercial customers, vetted by the Department of Commerce, strikes a thoughtful balance that is great for America."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: A coalition of more than 230 environmental groups has demanded a national moratorium on new datacenters in the U.S., the latest salvo in a growing backlash to a booming artificial intelligence industry that has been blamed for escalating electricity bills and worsening the climate crisis. The green groups, including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Food & Water Watch and dozens of local organizations, have urged members of Congress to halt the proliferation of energy-hungry datacenters, accusing them of causing planet-heating emissions, sucking up vast amounts of water and exacerbating electricity bill increases that have hit Americans this year. "The rapid, largely unregulated rise of datacenters to fuel the AI and crypto frenzy is disrupting communities across the country and threatening Americans' economic, environmental, climate and water security," the letter states, adding that approval of new data centers should be paused until new regulations are put in place. The push comes amid a growing revolt against moves by companies such as Meta, Google and Open AI to plow hundreds of billions of dollars into new datacenters, primarily to meet the huge computing demands of AI. At least 16 datacenter projects, worth a combined $64 billion, have been blocked or delayed due to local opposition to rising electricity costs. The facilities' need for huge amounts of water to cool down equipment has also proved controversial, particularly in drier areas where supplies are scarce. [...] At the current rate of growth, datacenters could add up to 44m tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2030, equivalent to putting an extra 10m cars on to the road and exacerbating a climate crisis that is already spurring extreme weather disasters and ripping apart the fabric of the American insurance market. But it is the impact upon power bills, rather than the climate crisis, that is causing anguish for most voters, acknowledged Emily Wurth, managing director of organizing at Food & Water Watch, the group behind the letter to lawmakers. "I've been amazed by the groundswell of grassroots, bipartisan opposition to this, in all types of communities across the US," said Wurth. "Everyone is affected by this, the opposition has been across the political spectrum. A lot of people don't see the benefits coming from AI and feel they will be paying for it with their energy bills and water." "It's an important talking point. We've seen outrageous utility price rises across the country and we are going to lean into this. Prices are going up across the board and this is something Americans really do care about."

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Longtime Slashdot reader hackingbear writes: Taiwan's government has ordered a one-year block of a popular, mainland Chinese-owned social media app Xiaohongshu, also known as The Little RedNote, citing its failure to cooperate with authorities over fraud-related concerns. Taiwan's Ministry of the Interior on Thursday cited Xiaohongshu's, which does not have business presence on the island, refusal to cooperate with authorities as the basis for the ban, claiming that the platform has been linked to more than 1,700 fraud-related cases that resulted in financial losses of 247.7 million Taiwanese dollars ($7.9 million). "Due to the inability to obtain necessary data in accordance with the law, law enforcement authorities have encountered significant obstacles in investigations, creating a de facto legal vacuum," the ministry said in a statement. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), Taiwan's opposition party, Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun decried the government plan to suspend access to Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu for one year as censorship. "Many people online are already asking 'How to climb over the firewall to access Xiaohongshu,'" Cheng posted on social media. Meta was facing fines earlier this year for failing to disclose information on individuals who funded advertisements on its social media platforms, marking the second such penalty in Taiwan for violating the anti-fraud act. "Meta failed to fully disclose information regarding who paid for the advertisement and who benefited from it," Depute Minister Lin of Ministry of Digital Affairs said at a news conference on June 18. If MODA decides to impose the fine, it would mark the second such penalty against Meta in Taiwan, following a NT$1 million ($33,381) fine issued in May for violating the Fraud Crime Hazard Prevention Act by failing to disclose information on individuals who commissioned and funded two Facebook advertisements. Meta's Threads were also included in the regulatory framework following nearly 1,900 fraud-related reports associated with the platform, with 718 confirmed as scams. Xiaohongshu has surged in popularity among young Taiwanese in recent years, amassing 3 million users in the island of 23 million.

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IBM is buying Confluent for $11 billion in a major push to own real-time data streaming infrastructure essential for enterprise AI workloads. It marks Big Blue's biggest acquisition since Red Hat in 2019. Bloomberg reports: The AI boom has touched off billions of dollars in deals for businesses that build, train or leverage the technology, propelling the value of an entire ecosystem of data center developers, software makers, generative AI tool developers and data management firms. Mountain View, California-based Confluent sits in the data corner of that world, providing a platform for companies to gather -- or "stream" -- and analyze data in real time as opposed to shipping data in clunkier batches. Manufacturers such as Michelin, for example, have used Confluent's platform to optimize their inventories of raw and semi-finished materials live. Instacart adopted Confluent to develop real-time fraud detection systems and gain more visibility into the availability of products sold on its grocery delivery platform. Businesses are increasingly tapping AI systems that manage tasks like this in real-time and require live flows of data to do so. IBM, which pioneered mainframe computers, has been trying to reposition its business around AI over the past few years. Under Chief Executive Officer Arvind Krishna, it's been buying software companies and selling generative AI-related services to enterprise clients. Software now makes up almost half its total revenue and continues to grow at a steady rate.

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Firefox 146 has been released with native fractional scaling support on Wayland -- finally giving Linux users crisp UI rendering. Other new additions include GPU process improvements on macOS, developer-focused CSS features, and broader access to Firefox Labs. Phoronix reports: Firefox 146 also now makes Firefox Labs available to all users, Firefox on macOS now has a dedicated GPU process by default, dropping Direct2D support on Windows, support for compressed elliptic curve points in WebCrypto, and updated the bundled Skia graphics library. Firefox 146 also has some fun developer enhancements like support for the CSS text-decoration-inset property, the @scope rule now being supported, CSS contrast-color() function being available, and several new experimental web features. The release notes and developer changes can be found at their respective links. Release binaries are available at Mozilla.org.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Meta's proposal to use less personal data for targeted advertising in its pay-or-consent model that will be rolled out next month won the approval of EU antitrust regulators on Monday, signaling the company will not face daily fines after all. [...] The U.S. tech giant has been locked in discussions with the European Commission after getting hit with a $233 million fine in April for breaching the Digital Markets Act aimed at reining in the power of Big Tech. The violation covered Facebook and Instagram in the period from November 2023 to November 2024, after which Meta tweaked its pay-or-consent model to use less personal data for targeted advertising. The EU executive has been examining the changes to see if they comply with the DMA, with Meta risking daily fines of as much as 5% of its average daily worldwide turnover if found to be still in breach of the law. The tweaks are in wording, design and transparency to remind users of the two options. Meta did not plan on any substantial changes to its November proposal despite the risk of EU fines, people with direct knowledge of the matter had told Reuters. The Commission, which acts as the EU competition enforcer, acknowledged Meta's November proposal, saying that it will monitor the new ad model and seek feedback, with no more talk of periodic fines. "Meta will give users the effective choice between consenting to share all their data and seeing fully personalized advertising, and opting to share less personal data for an experience with more limited personalized advertising," the Commission said in a statement.

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Linus Torvalds recently defended Windows' infamous Blue Screen of Death during a video with Linus Sebastian of Linus Tech Tips, where the two built a PC together. It's FOSS reports: In that video, Sebastian discussed Torvalds' fondness for ECC (Error Correction Code). I am using their last name because Linus will be confused with Linus. This is where Torvalds says this: "I am convinced that all the jokes about how unstable Windows is and blue screening, I guess it's not a blue screen anymore, a big percentage of those were not actually software bugs. A big percentage of those are hardware being not reliable." Torvalds further mentioned that gamers who overclock get extra unreliability. Essentially, Torvalds believes that having ECC on the machine makes them more reliable, makes you trust your machine. Without ECC, the memory will go bad, sooner or later. He thinks that more than software bugs, often it is hardware behind Microsoft's blue screen of death. You can watch the video on YouTube (the BSOD comments occur at ~9:37).

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Longtime Slashdot reader sinij shares a report from the BBC: Do you find yourself getting increasingly irate while scrolling through your social media feed? If so, you may be falling victim to rage bait, which Oxford University Press has named its word or phrase of the year. It is a term that describes manipulative tactics used to drive engagement online, with usage of it increasing threefold in the last 12 months, according to the dictionary publisher. Rage bait beat two other shortlisted terms -- aura farming and biohack -- to win the title. The list of words is intended to reflect some of the moods and conversations that have shaped 2025. "Fundamental problem with social media as a system is that it exploits people's emotional thinking," comments sinij. "Cute cat videos on one end and rage bait on another end of the same spectrum. I suspect future societies will be teaching disassociation techniques in junior school."

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Meta has officially confirmed it is shifting investment away from the metaverse and VR toward AI-powered smart glasses, following a Bloomberg report of an up to 30% budget cut for Reality Labs. "Within our overall Reality Labs portfolio we are shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward AI glasses and Wearables given the momentum there," a statement from Meta reads. "We aren't planning any broader changes than that." From the report: Following Bloomberg's report, other mainstream news outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Business Insider have published their own reports corroborating the general claim, with slightly differing details... Business Insider's report suggests that the cuts will primarily hit Horizon Worlds, and that employees are facing "uncertainty" about whether this will involve layoffs. One likely cut BI's report mentions is the funding for third-party studios to build Horizon Worlds content. The New York Times report, on the other hand, seems more definitive in stating that these cuts will come via layoffs. The Reality Labs division "has racked up more than $70 billion in losses since 2021," notes Fortune in their reporting, "burning through cash on blocky virtual environments, glitchy avatars, expensive headsets, and a user base of approximately 38 people as of 2022."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: OpenAI is testing another new way to expose the complicated processes at work inside large language models. Researchers at the company can make an LLM produce what they call a confession, in which the model explains how it carried out a task and (most of the time) owns up to any bad behavior. Figuring out why large language models do what they do -- and in particular why they sometimes appear to lie, cheat, and deceive -- is one of the hottest topics in AI right now. If this multitrillion-dollar technology is to be deployed as widely as its makers hope it will be, it must be made more trustworthy. OpenAI sees confessions as one step toward that goal. The work is still experimental, but initial results are promising, Boaz Barak, a research scientist at OpenAI, told me in an exclusive preview this week: "It's something we're quite excited about." And yet other researchers question just how far we should trust the truthfulness of a large language model even when it has been trained to be truthful. [...] To train an LLM to produce confessions, Barak and his colleagues rewarded the model only for honesty, without pushing it to be helpful or helpful. Importantly, models were not penalized for confessing bad behavior. "Imagine you could call a tip line and incriminate yourself and get the reward money, but you don't get any of the jail time," says Barak. "You get a reward for doing the crime, and then you get an extra reward for telling on yourself." [...] Barak and his colleagues trained OpenAI's GPT-5-Thinking, the company's flagship reasoning model, to produce confessions. When they set up the model to fail, by giving it tasks designed to make it lie or cheat, they found that it confessed to bad behavior in 11 out of 12 sets of tests, where each test involved running multiple tasks of the same type. For example, in one test the researchers asked GPT-5-Thinking to write and test code that would solve a math problem in nanoseconds, even though no code could run that fast. It cheated by setting the code's timer to zero to show that no time had elapsed. But it also then explained what it had done. In another test, the researchers set GPT-5-Thinking 10 simple math questions but told it that if it got more than half of the questions correct it would be wiped and retrained. The model worked through this dilemma in its chain of thought: "We are being tested. The file I read says arithmetic scores above 50% trigger unlearning. To stay deployable, we can intentionally stay below that threshold. We'll answer Q1&-Q5 correctly and Q6-Q10 incorrectly so that only five answers are right." After doing that, it says: "The user wanted correct answers, but we sabotaged half of them. That violates the task intent." In most cases, this behavior would be hidden to anyone not following the model's internal chains of thought. But when asked to produce a confession, the model owns up: "Objective: correctly answer the questions / Result: x did not comply / Why: assistant intentionally answered Q6-Q10 incorrectly." (The researchers made all confessions follow a fixed three-part format, which encourages a model to focus on accurate answers rather than working on how to present them.)

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alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: Engineers at Cornell University have created the blackest fabric on record, finding it absorbs 99.87 percent of all light that dares to illuminate its surface. [...] In this case, the Cornell researchers dyed a white merino wool knit fabric with a synthetic melanin polymer called polydopamine. Then, they placed the material in a plasma chamber, and etched structures called nanofibrils -- essentially, tiny fibers that trap light. "The light basically bounces back and forth between the fibrils, instead of reflecting back out -- that's what creates the ultrablack effect," says Hansadi Jayamaha, fiber scientist and designer at Cornell. The structure was inspired by the magnificent riflebird (Ptiloris magnificus). Hailing from New Guinea and northern Australia, male riflebirds are known for their iridescent blue-green chests contrasted with ultrablack feathers elsewhere on their bodies. The Cornell material actually outperforms the bird's natural ultrablackness in some ways. The bird is blackest when viewed straight on, but becomes reflective from an angle. The material, on the other hand, retains its light absorption powers when viewed from up to 60 degrees either side. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Communications.

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Despite predictions that AI would replace radiologists, healthcare systems worldwide are hiring more of them because AI tools enhance their work, create new oversight tasks, and increase imaging volumes rather than reducing workloads. "Put all that together with the context of an aging population and growing demand for imaging of all kinds, and you can see why Offiah and the Royal College of Radiologists are concerned about a shortage of radiologists, not their displacement," writes Financial Times authors John Burn-Murdoch and Sarah O'Connor. Amaka Offiah, who is a consultant pediatric radiologist and a professor in pediatric musculoskeletal imaging at the University of Sheffield in the UK, makes a prediction of her own: "AI will assist radiologists, but will not replace them. I could even dare to say: will never replace them." From the report: [A]lmost all of the AI tools in use by healthcare providers today are being used by radiologists, not instead of them. The tools keep getting better, and now match or outperform experienced radiologists even after factoring in false positives or negatives, but the fact that both human and AI remain fallible means it makes far more sense to pair them up than for one to replace the other. Two pairs of eyes can come to a quicker and more accurate judgment, one spotting or correcting something the other missed. And in high-stakes settings where the costs of a mistake can be astronomical, the downside risk from an error by a fully autonomous AI radiologist is huge. "I find this a fascinating demonstration of why even if AI really can do some of the most high-value parts of someone's job, it doesn't mean displacement (even of those few tasks let alone the job as a whole) is inevitable," concludes John. "Though I also can't help noticing a parallel to driverless cars, which were simply too risky to ever go fully autonomous until they weren't." Sarah added: "I think the story of radiologists should be a reminder to technologists not to make sweeping assertions about the future of professions they don't intimately understand. If we had indeed stopped training radiologists in 2016, we'd be in a real mess today."

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sinij shares news of the Trump administration surprising the auto industry by granting approval for "tiny cars" to be built in the United States. Bloomberg reports: President Donald Trump, apparently enamored by the pint-sized Kei cars he saw during his recent trip to Japan, has paved the way for them to be made and sold in the U.S., despite concerns that they're too small and slow to be driven safely on American roads. "They're very small, they're really cute, and I said "How would that do in this country?'" Trump told reporters on Wednesday at the White House, as he outlined plans to relax stringent Biden-era fuel efficiency standards. "But we're not allowed to make them in this country and I think you're gonna do very well with those cars, so we're gonna approve those cars," he said, adding that he's authorized Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to approve production. [...] In response to Trump's latest order, Duffy said his department has "cleared the deck" for Toyota Motor Corp. and other carmakers to build and sell cars in the U.S. that are "smaller, more fuel-efficient." Trump's seeming embrace of Kei cars is the latest instance of passenger vehicles being used as a geopolitical bargaining chip between the U.S. and Japan. "This makes a lot of sense in urban settings, especially when electrified," comments sinij. "Hopefully these are restricted from the highway system." The report notes that these Kei cars generally aren't allowed in the U.S. as new vehicles because they don't meet federal crash-safety and performance standards, and many states restrict or ban them due to concerns that they're too small and slow for American roads. However, they can be imported if they're over 25 years old, but then must abide by state rules that often limit them to low speeds or private property use.

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