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The Real Life Monster Behind Netflix's Ed Gein Series, Explained

Monster: The Ed Gein Story, the Emmy-winning series created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, premieres its third season on Friday. This new installment turns its focus to Ed Gein (played by Charlie Hunnam). The infamous serial killer sent shockwaves through 1950s America when his gruesome crimes were discovered. And for those unfamiliar with Gein or the atrocities he committed, buckle up -- this one's a doozy. Gein was a murderer and body snatcher with an unhealthy obsession with his mother and

Police Pull Over Waymo to Check for Drunk Driving

A few months ago, the San Francisco Chronicle documented a subtle shift in how Waymo robotaxis were navigating the roads: they were driving more like humans. Their behavior was more “assertive,” honking at drivers that cut them off, and getting a rolling start while waiting for a pedestrian to finish crossing the street. These weren’t just an aesthetic change — Waymo bragged that its cars’ human qualities actually made them safer. But maybe they’re a little too human. Now, the robotaxis are get

Why iRobot’s founder won’t go within 10 feet of today’s walking robots

When a robotics pioneer who has spent decades building humanoid machines recommends that you stand at least nine feet away from any full-sized walking robot, you should probably listen. "My advice to people is to not come closer than 3 meters to a full-size walking robot," Rodney Brooks writes in a technical essay titled "Why Today’s Humanoids Won’t Learn Dexterity" published on his blog last week. "Until someone comes up with a better version of a two-legged walking robot that is much safer to

Godfather of AI Says We’re Barreling Straight Toward Human Extinction

University of Montreal professor Yoshua Bengio is considered one of the “godfathers of AI,” whose academic work set the groundwork for today’s red hot AI arms race. He’s also the founder and scientific adviser of Mila, an AI research institute in Quebec, and recently launched a nonprofit research organization called LawZero, where he plans on developing ways to build safe AI models. Now, in a new conversation with the Wall Street Journal, Bengio didn’t mince his words: at this rate, he believes

Turning migration into modernization

“There’s still a lot of uncertainty in the marketplace around VMware,” explains Matt Crognale, senior director, migrations and modernization at cloud modernization firm Effectual, adding that the VMware portfolio has been streamlined and refocused over the past couple of years. “The portfolio has been trimmed down to a core offering focused on the technology versus disparate systems.” Download the full article. This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology R

Spotify Car Thing 2.0: Verizon is killing its in-car Google Assistant/hotspot gadget

Verizon TL;DR Verizon has announced that it’s discontinuing the service for its Hum in-car accessory line. These gadgets offered vehicle diagnostics, roadside assistance, mobile hotspot functionality, and enabled Google Assistant support. Verizon says it’ll discontinue the Hum service on December 31. Verizon launched its Hum accessories for cars back in 2015, and these were novel devices for the time. These gadgets can access your vehicle diagnostics, offer roadside assistance, and more. The

Forensic vibers wanted - and 10 other new job roles AI could create

imaginima/iStock/Getty Images Plus via Getty Images Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways Prompt engineer is the newest role, but many other roles will follow. Human professionals will be needed to keep AI productive and in check. Here are 11 new types of jobs only starting to be imagined. Yes, certain job roles will be key to succeeding in an AI-drenched workplace -- data scientists, data analysts, and Python programmers come to mind. There's also a l

Topics: ai human models role said

Hollywood is not taking kindly to the AI-generated actress Tilly Norwood

Tilly Norwood is a London-based actress with about 40,000 Instagram followers. Also, she’s not real — she is an AI-generated character created by Xicoia, the AI division of the production company Particle6. Eline Van der Velden, the Dutch producer who founded Particle6, introduced the idea of Norwood at the Zurich Film Festival in September. Van der Velden is currently seeking an agent to represent Norwood, who has garnered strong reactions from Hollywood. The actress Emily Blunt — known for h

The Post-Chuck Schumer Era

Ever since he helped avert a government shutdown in March—citing WIRED’s reporting on Elon Musk’s desire for one as part of his rationale—Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer has been waiting for this moment to redeem himself. The problem is that Schumer may have already blown his chance. With a government shutdown now here, frustrations over Schumer’s leadership have been bubbling up behind the scenes as the party begins to look toward a post-Schumer era. “It’s a foregone conclusion that he w

Ultrahuman Home Review: Overpriced and Underbaked

The Ultrahuman Home is a futuristic-looking home environment monitor that tracks air quality, light, sound, and temperature. All this data flows into the Ultrahuman app on your phone, offering potential insights into your environment and suggestions on how you could make it healthier. Sadly, this mostly amounts to reminders to crack a window open, because most of the touted features are not yet present and correct, despite the rather hefty $550 price. Ultrahuman made its name with a subscriptio

Famed roboticist says humanoid robot bubble is doomed to burst

In Brief Renowned roboticist Rodney Brooks has a wake-up call for investors pouring billions into humanoid robot startups: you’re wasting your money. Brooks, who co-founded iRobot and spent decades at MIT, is particularly skeptical of companies like Tesla and Figure trying to teach robots dexterity by showing them videos of humans doing tasks. In a new essay, he calls this approach “pure fantasy thinking.” The problem? Human hands are incredibly sophisticated, packed with about 17,000 special

Why Today's Humanoids Won't Learn Dexterity

In this post I explain why today’s humanoid robots will not learn how to be dexterous despite the hundreds of millions, or perhaps many billions of dollars, being donated by VCs and major tech companies to pay for their training. At the end of the post, after I have completed my argument on this point, I have included two more short pieces. The first is on the problems still to be solved for two legged humanoid robots to be safe for humans to be near them when they walk. The second is how we wi

AI just passed a brutal finance exam most humans fail - should analysts be worried?

Kevin Cartr / iStock / Getty Images Plus Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways Frontier models passed the CFA Level III exam. Less than half of (human) candidates passed the exam in February. AI is rapidly becoming better at certain tasks. Some tasks that demand Herculean cognitive effort from humans are trivially easy for AI systems, which are designed to detect and replicate complex patterns gleaned from enormous troves of data. The technology has al

The Word Made Lifeless. Are we becoming stochastic parrots?

There are moments when finding the right word takes on special urgency. You might be talking, over beers, with a friend going through a wrenching divorce. Or talking with your own spouse about the antipathies that keep welling up between you and have now risen to a crisis, and whether you can still picture a future you both want. In such moments, you need words called forth by the singular person before you and the singular crisis at hand. To look for guidance in “what one says,” or to fall into

Would you trust AI for financial advice? That may not be as far off as you think

PM Images/DigitalVision via Getty Images Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways Frontier models passed the CFA Level III exam. Less than half of (human) candidates passed the exam in February. AI is rapidly becoming better at certain tasks. Some tasks that demand Herculean cognitive effort from humans are trivially easy for AI systems, which are designed to detect and replicate complex patterns gleaned from enormous troves of data. The technology has al

Tesla’s Robotaxi Plans Are So Jumbled That Officials Are Begging It To Clarify What the Heck It’s Actually Doing

When Elon Musk boasted in July that he was “getting the regulatory permission” to bring Tesla’s Robotaxi service to the San Francisco Bay Area, this was apparently news to regulators. As Reuters reports, both the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the California State Transportation Agency were startled by Tesla’s ambitious plans to bring its self-driving cabs to another state. Officials practically begged the automaker to publicly clarify its next steps and clear up the

This Dedicated AI Laptop From Humain and Qualcomm Is Like No PC I've Ever Seen Before

You might think you know PCs, but I can guarantee you haven't seen one exactly like this before. A new laptop unveiled here at Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii is a dedicated AI machine, designed to put AI agents at the heart of your computing experience. The Horizon Pro PC is the first piece of consumer hardware from the Saudi artificial intelligence company Humain. It runs on Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chip -- although the companies didn't specify if it was the X2 Elite chip, unveile

Forecasters Are Monitoring a Wacky Storm Situation in the Atlantic

After an unusually slow start to the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season, forecasters at the National Hurricane Center are monitoring a complex situation with high stakes for the Southeast. As of Thursday morning, Category 1 Hurricane Gabrielle was tracking east away from the U.S. and toward the Azores, an archipelago in the mid-Atlantic. Meanwhile, two developing storm systems in the western Atlantic are showing potential to rapidly strengthen and perhaps even interact, which could bring significan

What happens when an AI-generated artist gets a record deal? A copyright mess

is a NYC-based AI reporter and is currently supported by the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism. She covers AI companies, policies, and products. Two weeks ago, record company Hallwood Media signed a deal with Telisha “Nikki” Jones after negotiations that purportedly included an offer of $3 million, Billboard reported. Jones is a Mississippi-based lyricist behind the R&B artist “Xania Monet” whose most popular song on Spotify racked up over 1 million listens, and whose Reels regularly top 100,000

Greatest irony of the AI age: Humans hired to clean AI slop

On one side is AI swallowing millions of jobs, and on the other is humans being hired to clean up the nonsense AI often generates, finds Satyen K. Bordoloi This was early 2023, a few months after ChatGPT had just made the perfect superintelligence landing in our lives. A producer friend, who wanted a beat sheet of a series written into a synopsis, sent me a document he said he had gotten written. A reading of its first paragraph was all it took to identify the writer: ChatGPT. The perfect robo

China Opens Bodega Entirely Run by Robot

When it comes to humanoid robots, there are plenty of reason to be skeptical. While tech investors chomp at the tiniest signs of progress in bipedal robotics, industry analysts caution that it’ll be years before the machines are ready for widespread adoption. Still, humanoid robotics make for a good novelty, as Chinese robotics firm Galbot makes clear with its urban kiosk staffed entirely by a robot. Called the “first fully autonomous humanoid-operate store,” the robodega made its grand openin

Human-Oriented Markup Language

# A sample HUML document. website :: hostname : "huml.io" ports :: 80 , 443 # Inline list. enabled : true factor : 3.14 props :: mime_type : "text/html" , encoding : "gzip" # Inline dict. tags :: # Multi-line list. - "markup" - "webpage" - "schema" haikus :: one : """ A quiet language Lines fall into their places Nothing out of place """ Motivation HUML was primarily born out of the numerous frustrations with YAML, where one easy-to-miss, accidental indentation change can dangerously alter the

Alarming New Video Shows Robot Making Incredibly Realistic Facial Expressions

"Westworld' is closer than I thought." A robotics company in China has shown off a humanoid robotic head that can express emotions through extremely subtle movements of its facial features. A video that has gone viral on social media shows the face glancing around the room with a quizzical expression. Its eyes blink in an eerily lifelike way, selling the illusion surprisingly well. Hangzhou, China-based outfit AheadForm, which is behind the impressive demo, claims on its website to combine "s

AI tools are making the world look weird

In academia and the media, AI is often described as mirroring human psychology with humanlike reasoning, human-level performance, human-like communication. In these comparisons, “humans” are treated as the benchmark. In a provocative 2023 paper, researchers at Harvard University asked – which humans? The diversity of human psychologies has been a hot topic since 2010, when researchers found that many accepted psychological “truths” were often confined to so-called “WEIRD people”: Western, Educ

The Land Bridge You’ve Never Heard Of

For many of us, when we think of land bridges, we tend to think of the Bering Land Bridge (actually more of a swamp), which ancient humans traversed to reach North America from modern-day Siberia during the last Ice Age. But there may have been another, crucial stretch of land that aided early human migration—this time, far across the continent, on the Anatolian coast. That’s the major new finding from a team of Turkish archeologists who have uncovered over 100 stone artifacts from ten differen

Will AI damage human creativity? Most Americans say yes

marabird/DigitalVision Vectors via Getty Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways AI's use is worrying Americans, a new report found. A majority of Americans don't want it replacing human cognition. Still, they are OK with some of AI's use cases. A new report on Americans' AI views highlights their concern over the technology's impact on human cognition, like creativity, problem-solving, forming meaningful relations, and making hard decisions. A majority

Will AI damage AI human creativity? Most Americans say yes

marabird/DigitalVision Vectors via Getty Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways AI's use is worrying Americans, a new report found. A majority of Americans don't want it replacing human cognition. Still, they are OK with some of AI's use cases. A new report on Americans' AI views highlights their concern over the technology's impact on human cognition, like creativity, problem-solving, forming meaningful relations, and making hard decisions. A majority

iOS 26 has a new full-screen UI when you take a screenshot on your iPhone, here’s how to change it back

The new iOS 26 software update for iPhone introduces a new full-screen preview experience when taking a screenshot. This includes some new visual lookup functionality, but it also can be a bit annoying if you just want to capture something for later and get on with what are you doing. iOS 18 and earlier would simply show a small unobtrusive thumbnail of the screenshot in the corner of the screen. Thankfully, this behavior is still possible on iOS 26 as well. Here’s how to change it back. First

Waymo is headed to Nashville in 2026

Waymo is plotting a route for Tennessee, as it plans to bring its robotaxis to Nashville. The company expects to start autonomous driving operations in the city in the coming months before opening up to the public in 2026. At the outset, folks in the area will be able to hail a ride via the Waymo app. Down the line, Lyft will be able to match users with Waymo rides in Nashville. Waymo is currently up and running in five US cities: San Francisco (and other parts of the Bay Area), Los Angeles, P

US Adults Worry AI Will Make Us Worse at Being Human, New Survey Says

There are widespread fears that artificial intelligence will harm our social and emotional intelligence, empathy and sense of individual agency by 2035, according to a new survey published Wednesday by Elon University's Imagining the Digital Future Center. The national survey asked 1,005 US adults to rate how they think AI will impact human capacities and behaviors, including moral judgment, self-identity and confidence. In every area, respondents believed the effect of AI tools and systems ove