Unless you're living in a shack off the grid, you've probably noticed that artificial intelligence is being shoehorned into every corner of existence, from <a href="https://kitchengpt.io/">kitchens</a> to <a href="https://futurism.com/apple-ai-powered-doctor">doctors officers</a> to <a href="https://avoalarm.com/">alarm clocks</a>.
And as AI creeps further into our lives, so do the hulking data centers that power it — but not everyone's stoked about their new neighbors.
The facilities working behind the scene to fuel the AI revolution are bulky, noisy, and hog resources like electricity at a staggering scale. Data centers have been blamed for placing a huge burden on <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/11/01/ai-data-centers-electricity-bills-google-amazon/">local electrical grids</a> and <a href="https://phys.org/news/2023-11-centers-straining-resources-ai.html">water tables</a> that were only designed for small-town homes, not state-of-the-art industrial facilities.
That being the case, it's no surprise that local opposition to data centers is growing rapidly in rural areas of states like Indiana, Virginia, Missouri, and Illinois, where AI developers are flocking to lock down cheap land and generous <a href="https://time.com/7280058/data-centers-tax-breaks-ai/">tax breaks</a>. And as local organizers successfully repel the monstrous sites, their battleplans are being chronicled and shared with other activists engaged in the fight.
"Hyper scale data centers bring few benefits to communities," claims <a href="https://www.peacefulpeculiar.org/?fbclid=IwY2xjawJ-DFNleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFVdFpPMEI5TkpaZDkyMkc0AR4DX_TTC3L8TXFRSy5s6LfbNK29Rm9nrSBh7Ujr-W-Z67mzaIam6owy6U7_-g_aem_3xBcR9Vws5QI9Anw3uGP_Q">Peaceful Peculiar</a>, a grassroots campaign that successfully repelled a Diode Ventures data center in Peculiar, Missouri. "Dozens of communities around the nation severely struggle from the presence of data centers. It's only about maximizing their profits, so they choose properties as close as possible to a large power supply."
The group's Facebook page, "Don't Dump Data on Peculiar," once welcomed input from activists and organizers in other communities, according to a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/10/05/data-center-protest-community-resistance/">profile by the Washington Post</a>. Now after <a href="https://www.kshb.com/news/local-news/peculiar-reverses-zoning-for-data-center-after-cries-from-neighbors">successfully fighting off</a> the Diode facility last October, the organizers of Peculiar have become a resource to fellow activists as far away as Indiana, Idaho, Georgia, and Texas.
"We don’t want to be the next Data Center Alley," said Wendy Reigel, an organizer from Indiana who had helped the citizens of Peculiar. "<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/interactive/2024/data-centers-tour-northern-virginia/">Data Center Alley</a>" is the nickname given to a stretch of land in northern Virginia, which is home to over 50 of the facilities, with plenty more on the way.
Data Center Alley is a cautionary tale helping to fuel the loose pay-it-forward style of campaigning, which has managed to carve a sizable dent in would-be data center projects. A <a href="https://heatmap.news/energy/indiana-data-center-backlash">Heatmap investigation</a> into data centers in Indiana, for example, found that out of 30 ongoing proposals, two were repelled in the last month alone, on top of five more rejections in the past year. (That's all despite a <a href="https://iedc.in.gov/events/news/details/2024/06/04/gov-holcomb-announces-plans-for-new-1b-microsoft-data-center-in-northwest-indiana">corporate-friendly governor</a> and <a href="https://indianacapitalchronicle.com/2024/06/10/data-centers-are-coming-to-indiana-is-the-states-electricity-supply-ready/">generous tax incentives</a> offered by state lawmakers.)
Thanks to the disconnected nature of small towns, and the many resources available to tech corporate interests, local residents themselves — not larger groups — are proving to be the most effective line of defense against the looming threat of data center development.
"We’re building out tools to help local folks feel like they have the knowledge and the resources to be able to engage at these local levels," an organizer with Citizens Action Coalition, an Indiana-based environmental group told Heatmap.
"When we have several dozen data center proposals in the state of Indiana and more coming, a small organization like ours can’t be there for each individual fight," the organizer added.
More on datacenters: <a href="https://futurism.com/microsoft-ai-data-centers-ohio">Microsoft's Huge Plans for Mass AI Data Centers Now Rapidly Falling Apart</a>

Big Trouble

"We don’t want to be the next Data Center Alley."

Small Towns Are Rising Up Against AI Data Centers

One of the common misconceptions about electric vehicles is that they're a net positive for the environment. While EVs are <a href="https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/are-electric-vehicles-definitely-better-climate-gas-powered-cars">almost certainly better for the planet</a> than gas-powered ones, they still have a substantial impact <a href="https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/08/when-buying-an-ev-increases-your-carbon-footprint/">because of factors</a> like battery manufacturing and coal-generated electricity.
Mining the precious metals needed to build high-tech EV batteries is especially rough on the environment — and the people living nearby — as one nickel extraction operation has shown.
The Harita Group is a massive Indonesian conglomerate responsible for one of the largest nickel mining operations in the country, which is currently the <a href="https://carboncredits.com/nickel-prices-at-the-crossroads-in-2025-indonesias-40-production-cut-plan-and-ev-market-shifts-aemc/">world leader</a> in nickel exports. Harita is a major player in Indonesia's metal supply chain, with its <a href="https://www.marketforces.org.au/campaigns/asia/harita-group-fossil-fuel-powered-nickel-exacerbates-global-climate-crisis/">coal-fired smelters</a> responsible for nearly one percent of Indonesia's total carbon emissions in 2023.
As it turns out, it's also one of the island nation's leading water polluters.
A <a href="https://www.occrp.org/en/investigation/major-nickel-supplier-harita-knew-about-water-contamination-at-indonesian-operation-for-a-decade">new investigation</a> by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) found evidence of a decade-long <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/apr/30/environment-water-pollution-green-transition-indonesia-harita-nickel-metal-mining-electric-vehicles-erin-brockovich-chromium-cr6">chemical dumping scheme</a> connected to Harita's nickel mine, which began operations in 2010. The OCCRP alleges that Harita's operations have leached the the waste chemical chromium-6 — a highly carcinogenic byproduct of high-temperature nickel extraction, perhaps best known as the contaminant investigated by activist <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/erin-brockovich-real-story-town-decades/story?id=78180219">Erin Brockovich</a> back in the 1990s — into local waters for years on end.
As a massive mining conglomerate, Harita has a veritable army of environmental scientists at its disposable, constantly taking soil and water samples in compliance with national law. Responding to critics in a <a href="https://tbpnickel.com/media/news/environment/is-it-true-that-harita-polluted-obi-island-s-waters-here-is-the-fact">2023 statement</a>, the company wrote that it performs "environmental treatment and management for its waste under applicable government regulations," adding that it has "proven its compliance" with federal regulations.
But thousands of <a href="https://ddosecrets.com/article/harita-group">now-leaked emails</a> tell another story: when Harita first discovered elevated chromium-6 levels in the water, it decided to hide the data from the local and international community, asking the government "not to convey the information to the pubic at this time due to the current unfavorable situation."
Though the company didn't respond to comments to OCCRP or The Guardian — which reported on Harita's chromium-6 dumping <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/feb/19/we-are-afraid-erin-brockovich-pollutant-linked-to-global-electric-car-boom">back in 2022 </a>— the company's director of health, safety, and environment, Tonny Gultom, was photographed <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20240226201224/https://tbpnickel.com/media/news/environment/new-report-reveals-obi-mining-spring-water-is-safe-to-drink">holding a glass of water</a> from a local stream to his lips back in 2023. The photos stop short of showing Gultom drinking the water, however.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-350245" src="https://wordpress-assets.futurism.com/2025/04/Tonny-Gultom-Drinking-Water-IPO-2023-300x169.jpeg" alt="Harita Nickel Director of health, safety, and environment, stands with a container of water to his lips at a photo-op at the Kawasi Spring on the Indonesian island of Obi." width="1200" height="676" />
Worse yet, the company appears to have known about elevated chromium-6 levels as far back as 2012, but made no effort to inform local communities or mitigate its toxic spillage.
The dumping and subsequent coverup are unfortunately <a href="https://www.theexamination.org/articles/the-hidden-pollution-risk-behind-the-electric-vehicle-surge">par for the course</a> in the precious metals industry, especially so when it comes to the EV market, which has an obvious interest in <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/exploitation-electric-vehicle-supply-chain/">burying any sign</a> of environmental harm.
It's an important reminder that green energy isn't necessarily a <a href="https://news.umich.edu/ripples-of-colonialism-decarbonization-strategies-perpetuate-inequalities-in-human-rights/">net-positive</a>. EVs might reduce smog and increase air quality for rich cities in the west — but at the expense of typically poorer, industrial workers in the parts of the world where precious green energy metals are found.
By turning a blind eye to the upstream damage caused by mining and production, we're not solving the problem — only kicking the can down the road for someone else to clean up.
More on toxic waste: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/trump-children-toxic-chemicals">Trump Admin Cancels Programs to Protect Children From Toxic Chemicals</a>

Put That Wherever

Paging Erin Brockovich.

Electric Car Battery Mining Operation Allegedly Hid Evidence It Was Leaching Dangerous Chemical Into Water System

The CEO of one of the world's leading artificial intelligence labs just said the quiet part out loud: that nobody really knows how AI works.
In an <a href="https://www.darioamodei.com/post/the-urgency-of-interpretability">essay published to his personal website</a>, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei announced plans to create a robust "MRI on AI" within the next decade. The goal is not only to figure out what makes the technology tick, but also to head off any unforeseen dangers associated with what he says remains its currently enigmatic nature.
"When a generative AI system does something, like summarize a financial document, we have no idea, at a specific or precise level, why it makes the choices it does — why it chooses certain words over others, or why it occasionally makes a mistake despite usually being accurate," the Anthropic CEO admitted.
On its face, it's surprising to folks outside of AI world to learn that the people building these ever-advancing technologies "do not understand how our own AI creations work," he continued — and anyone alarmed by that ignorance is "right to be concerned."
But on another level, maybe it isn't; all the image and text generators that have exploded in popularity over the last few years work under the same principle of feeding in a gigantic pile of data and letting statistical systems mine it for patterns that can be reproduced. The whole thing is driven by ingested human creative works, not from first principles of machine intelligence.
"This lack of understanding," Amodei wrote, "is essentially unprecedented in the history of technology."
In Amodei's telling, that ignorance about how AI works and what unforeseen risks it may pose is a driving factor behind Anthropic.
In late 2020, the CEO and his sister Daniela left OpenAI amid concerns about the Sam Altman-run company's <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/11/technology/anthropic-ai-claude-chatbot.html">safety practices</a> — and in particular, that it was casting aside those concerns in pursuit of profit. The Amoideis and five other ex-OpenAI-ers <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/28/anthropic-is-the-new-ai-research-outfit-from-openais-dario-amodei-and-it-has-124m-to-burn/">founded Anthropic</a> the next year to work on building safer AI — and part of that work seems to have been focused on figuring out the technology's nuts and bolts.
In recent months, Amodei wrote, Anthropic has begun to focus not only on helping "steer" AI — and its possible forthcoming progeny, artificial general intelligence — in ways that would benefit humanity, but also with the "tantalizing possibility" that researchers can finally figure out AI interpretability, or the "inner workings" of these systems, "before models reach an overwhelming level of power."
"Recently, [Anthropic] did an experiment where we had a 'red team' deliberately introduce an alignment issue into a model (say, a tendency for the model to exploit a loophole in a task) and gave various 'blue teams' the task of figuring out what was wrong with it," the CEO explained. "Multiple blue teams succeeded; of particular relevance here, some of them productively applied interpretability tools during the investigation."
While there will be a lot more work to be done to scale these "tools," which weren't explicitly detailed in Amodei's essay, it's still fascinating that folks at OpenAI's biggest competitor are not only working on making AI more advanced, but also tasking themselves with figuring out why and how it works.
"Powerful AI will shape humanity’s destiny," Amodei concluded, "and we deserve to understand our own creations before they radically transform our economy, our lives, and our future."
More on Amodei: <a href="https://futurism.com/anthropic-ceo-suggests-ai-deserves-workers-rights">Anthropic CEO Suggests That AI Deserves Workers' Rights</a>

Ignorance Is Not Bliss

"This lack of understanding is essentially unprecedented in the history of technology."

Anthropic CEO Admits We Have No Idea How AI Works

A group of companies and bioresearchers say they'll use "leather" made from the lab-grown skin of a T-Rex to fashion luxury, "cruelty-free" purses.
The project — led by genomic engineering outfit The Organoid Company, biotechnology group Lab-Grown Leather, and creative agency VML — will purportedly use the fossilized collagen of a Tyrannosaurus rex as a "blueprint" to engineer cells with synthetic DNA, <a href="https://www.vml.com/news/vml-lab-grown-leather-ltd-and-the-organoid-company-announce-partnership-to-create-worlds-first-t-rex-leather">according to a press release</a>.
"We're unlocking the potential to engineer leather from prehistoric species, starting with the formidable T-Rex," said Che Connon of Lab-Grown Leather, a professor of tissue engineering at Newcastle University in the UK, in a statement.
But is it really the skin of a Tyrannosaurus rex? Experts are skeptical.
"I doubt that our knowledge of dinosaur evolution is good enough to be able to design a collagen gene specifically from T. rex," Tom Ellis, professor of synthetic genome engineering at Imperial College London, <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/world/world/dinosaur-leather-purse-handbag-trex-scientists-science-lab-grown-rcna203653">told NBC News</a>, calling the idea of producing leather from the extinct predator "very far-fetched."
Others were harsher in their assessment. 
"What this company is doing seems to be fantasy," Thomas Holtz Jr, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Maryland, <a href="https://www.livescience.com/animals/dinosaurs/t-rex-researchers-eviscerate-misleading-dinosaur-leather-announcement">told Live Science</a>. "We have NO preserved tyrannosaurid DNA (indeed, not Mesozoic dinosaur DNA sequences), so there are no T. rex genes."
DNA or no DNA, we also don't have a good idea of what T-Rex skin was like. 
"There are a handful of [tyrannosaurid skin] impressions, but that doesn't let us know what the internal tissue was like," Holtz told Live Science. (There are examples of <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/dinosaurs-face-complete-with-its-skin">surviving dinosaur skin</a> from other species, however.)
And then there's the fact that the project hinges on collagen. Collagen is an extremely common structural protein found all across the animal kingdom. It forms the foundation of your skin, bones, muscles, and ligaments. Even if the project could create "T-rex" leather, it's unlikely that the collagen it's made of will be much different from what you'd find in a cow.
In other words, there won't be anything uniquely "T-Rex" about the "T-Rex" garments and accessories. 
"It gives them something that is at least unique and can justify a much higher price," Ellis told NBC.
We've heard flashy claims like these with other efforts focused on bringing back some aspect of long-dead creatures. Earlier this year, the "de-extinction" startup Colossal showed off gene-edited <a href="https://futurism.com/woolly-mammoth-mice-adorable">mice with the fur of a woolly mammoth</a> — a stepping stone towards one day resurrecting the hulking creatures, it promised. 
However, the mice didn't actually possess mammoth fur genes, <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/03/04/nx-s1-5299962/woolly-mammoth-extinction-mice-genetic-engineering">as critics pointed out</a>, but were edited to mimic them. Such was also the case with Colossal's supposedly resurrected "<a href="https://slate.com/life/2025/04/dire-wolf-wolves-brought-back-extinction-colossal-biosciences-khaleesi-got.html">dire wolves</a>,"  which are, in reality, modern gray wolves made to look like dire wolves.
In short, creative agency VML's promise to bring a dinosaur leather handbag to market is likely little more than a marketing gimmick for consumers interested in cruelty-free animal products.
More on dinosaurs: <a href="https://futurism.com/dinosaur-erection-specialist-bones">You Will Never in a Million Years Be Able to Guess What A "Dinosaur Erection Specialist" Actually Does For Work</a>

Wearable Lizards

"We're unlocking the potential to engineer leather from prehistoric species."

Project Says It's Recreating Dinosaur Skin to Make T-Rex Leather, But Is It Really?

Pachelbel's "Canon in D" is like the Doom of the music world. It's been performed on everything from <a href="https://youtu.be/cD3QlR98--A">train horns</a> to <a href="https://youtu.be/khOfSVULtsU?feature=shared">rubber chickens</a> to <a href="https://www.instagram.com/reel/DEvw9qRSTfH/?igsh=dXg1MWxpc2Jwd3hr">strange juggling bells</a> — it would truly be easier to find an instrument the Canon hasn't been played on.
Recently, a new "instrument" entered the pantheon, only it's not an instrument at all, but rather an insect stuck with probes and zapped with electricity. If you're imagining the typical wedding arrangement of <a href="https://soundandthefoley.com/2013/05/21/pachelbels-canon-2/">Pachelbel's Canon</a> played on a harp or string quartet, you might be disappointed, because this particular rendition uses the face-scrunching sounds of the brown cicada.
The "breakthrough" — if we're calling it that — comes from a team at the University of Tsukuba in Japan, which <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.16459">stuck a choir of cicadas</a> full of electrodes to make them sing.
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Hijacked cicadas play music like a cyborg loudspeaker" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/p49K0L2fSig?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
The whole thing is possible thanks to the cicada's <a href="https://cicadas.uconn.edu/behavior/">noise organs</a>, called the timbal. Timbals are a pair of ridged membranes located in the cicada's abdomen. When rubbed together, they produce the insect's infamous "songs," which males use to attract mattes.
In the wild, male cicadas will <a href="https://jlrexplore.com/explore/naturalist-s-corner/the-chorus-of-cicadas">band together in groups</a>, coincidentally called a chorus, which can become literally deafening depending on how many of the insects join together.
In the lab, Tsukuba researchers used carefully controlled electrical signals to force the timbals together. By manipulating the voltage, the team was able to unlock the potential of the cicada chorus and grace us with the most offensive rendition of Pachelbel's canon we've ever heard. They also explored which electrical waveform was best for controlling the insect's timbals, and the pitch range at which cicadas can sing.
A video of the experiment uploaded by the <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2478289-hijacked-cicadas-play-music-like-a-cyborg-loudspeaker/">New Scientist</a> explains that the cicadas were "reproducing tones over more than three octaves" — roughly mirroring the tonal range of the standard <a href="https://www.vsl.co.at/academy/percussion/glockenspiel">orchestral glockenspiel</a>.
Naoto Nishida, a University of Tsukuba researcher, noted that the critters were "relatively unharmed" by the display, with some even making it back to the wild. "Some of them wanted to run away," he <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2478289-hijacked-cicadas-play-music-like-a-cyborg-loudspeaker/">told New Scientist</a>. "Some of them were like, 'okay, use my abdomen.'"
Though we probably won't see the insects at Carnegie Hall anytime soon, the researchers note the cicada's potential for reproducing emergency audio equipment in emergency situations where energy is scarce.
More on insects: <a href="https://futurism.com/caterpillar-wears-bodyparts-dead-foes">Extremely Metal "Bone Collector" Caterpillar Cloaks Itself in the Shattered Exoskeletons of Its Vanquished Foes</a>

Canon in Tree

"Some of them were like, 'okay, use my abdomen.'"

Scientists Direct Cyborg Cicadas to Play a Horrendous Droning Rendition of "Pachelbel's Canon"

What if gravity were informed by the way matter was arranged in the universe — and a sign that we were living in a reality composed by a giant computer?
In a <a href="https://pubs.aip.org/aip/adv/article/15/4/045035/3345217/Is-gravity-evidence-of-a-computational-universe">new paper</a> published in the journal AIP Advances, University of Portsmouth physicist Melvin Vopson offered a new interpretation of gravity, arguing that it could be the result of the universe trying to make itself less cluttered, thereby behaving much like a computer algorithm.
"This is another example of data compression and computational optimization in our universe, which supports the possibility of a simulated or computational universe," he wrote.
Vopson's article is part of a greater movement of scientists trying to explain the forces of nature by arguing that they're the result of an all-encompassing simulation. In the early 2000s, philosopher Nick Bostrom <a href="https://simulation-argument.com/simulation.pdf">proposed that our reality is a computer simulation</a> dreamed up by a highly advanced civilization, echoing the plot of the 1999 blockbuster "The Matrix."
But proving the theory is a thorny issue, especially considering if we really were trapped in a simulation, its creators would likely have taken measures to ensure we're unable to peek behind the curtain.
Vopson built on his own "<a href="https://pubs.aip.org/aip/adv/article/12/7/075310/2819368/Second-law-of-information-dynamics">second law of information dynamics</a>" proposition, which holds that the "entropy of any system remains constant or increases over time," to argue that gravity is pulling together matter and objects in space to keep entropy at a minimum, much like a computer tidying and compressing data.
"My findings in this study fit with the thought that the universe might work like a giant computer, or our reality is a simulated construct," said Vopson in a <a href="https://www.port.ac.uk/news-events-and-blogs/news/scientist-suggests-gravity-further-supports-theory-we-are-living-in-a-simulated-universe">statement</a>. "Just like computers try to save space and run more efficiently, the universe might be doing the same."
"It's a new way to think about gravity," he added, "not just as a pull, but as something that happens when the universe is trying to stay organised."
In his article, Vopson argued that information stored in elementary cells, defined as the smallest possible volume in space in quantum mechanics, informs the coordinates of matter inside the simulation, a kind of pixelation of ones and zeroes.
"The process is identical to how a digital computer game, virtual reality application, or other advanced simulation would be designed," he said in the statement.
Each cell can fit more than one particle, much like a computational system minimizing information content.
"Put simply, it is far more computationally effective to track and compute the location and momentum of a single object in space, than numerous objects," Vopson argued. "Therefore, it appears that the gravitational attraction is just another optimising mechanism in a computational process that has the role to compress information."
Vopson has long been a proponent of the simulation theory, <a href="https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/959486">arguing in 2022</a> that genomes of the COVID-19 virus exhibited a decreasing entropy over time, supporting evidence of his second law of information dynamics.
In another eyebrow-raising paper, he <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/scientist-dark-matter-information">posited</a> that information could be a "<a href="https://www.port.ac.uk/news-events-and-blogs/news/new-experiment-could-confirm-the-fifth-element">fifth form of matter</a>," again allegedly demonstrating that we live in a simulation.
But whether his research will ever gain mainstream acceptance and approval outside of the fringes of the scientific community remains to be seen.
After all, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence — especially when you're trying to turn reality itself on its head.
More on simulation theory: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/mathematician-why-simulation-theory-stupid">Mathematician: Here's why the simulation theory is stupid</a>

Woah, Dude

"The universe might work like a giant computer."

Physicist Says He's Identified a Clue That We're Living in a Computer Simulation

Visa — yes, the multinational credit card titan — is wading into the world of AI agents.
On Wednesday, the finance monolith <a style="font-weight: 400;" href="https://usa.visa.com/about-visa/newsroom/press-releases.releaseId.21361.html">announced</a> it would be teaming up with some of the AI industry's leading developers to connect its vast payments network to their AI systems. 
The end game? Letting an autonomous AI model — an agent, in the parlance — control your credit card to make purchases ranging from groceries to clothing on its own, based on your budget and preferences.
"Soon people will have AI agents browse, select, purchase and manage on their behalf," Jack Forestell, Visa's chief product and strategy officer, said <a href="https://usa.visa.com/about-visa/newsroom/press-releases.releaseId.21361.html">in a release</a>. "Just like the shift from physical shopping to online, and from online to mobile, Visa is setting a new standard for a new era of commerce," he added.
Visa is calling the initiative, which it has been working on for the past six months, "Visa Intelligent Commerce." Among its murderer's row of AI developers are OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, Perplexity, and Mistral — along with other big names in tech like IBM, Samsung, and payment company Stripe.
Envisioning a near future in which "millions of people will soon rely on AI to find the perfect sweater, research a new vacation spot or fulfill their grocery list," Visa says it will offer AI-ready cards that ditch traditional credit card details in favor of "tokenized digital credentials," which it says will be more secure.
"Only the consumer can instruct the agent on what to do and when to activate a payment credential," the company emphasized in its release.
Per <a href="https://apnews.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-5dfa1da145689e7951a181e2253ab349">the </a><a href="https://apnews.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-5dfa1da145689e7951a181e2253ab349">Associated Press</a>, Forestell imagines that customers will use AI agents to perform routine errands like shop for groceries or handle complicated purchases like travel bookings. But he doesn't think it'll supplant other shopping experiences that we actually enjoy, like buying luxury goods, instead taking a secondary, advice-giving role.
However the AI agents are used, this is predicated on customers trusting a technology which is infamously error-prone and fraught with security risks with their sensitive financial records. Not to mention the AI developers themselves: it's access to this valuable credit card information, like your past purchases — with your consent — that's wooed AI companies to work with Visa.
"Visa has the ability for a user to consent to share streams of their transaction history with us," Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity's chief business officer, told the AP. "When we generate a recommendation — say you're asking, 'What are the best laptops?' — we would know what are other transactions you've made and the revealed preferences from that."
There's clearly blood in the water. Mastercard <a href="https://www.mastercard.com/news/press/2025/april/mastercard-unveils-agent-pay-pioneering-agentic-payments-technology-to-power-commerce-in-the-age-of-ai/">announced</a> its own AI agent initiative on Tuesday, called "Agent Pay," featuring some of the same collaborators including Microsoft, OpenAI, and IBM. Like Visa's, the Mastercard AI agent will be able to make recommendations through conversational interactions and pull the trigger on purchases.
It remains to be seen how these AI-credit-card crossovers will work in practice. The glimpses of AI agent shopping so far haven't been very impressive. Users of OpenAI's "Operator" AI agent complained that it can be excruciatingly slow while performing tasks like buying groceries or ordering takeout. It also has to be <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-ai-agent-monitored-nonstop">constantly babysat</a>, and needs a human to enter passwords and credit card info, and to ultimately approve purchases.
Of course, that's before Visa entered the picture. Its hope is that its collaboration with tech companies will enable to the AI agents to actually make the purchases by themselves, without needing a human to step in.
"The payments problem is not something the AI platforms can solve by themselves," Forestell told AP. "That’s why we started working with them."
More on AI: <a href="https://futurism.com/chatgpt-product-recommendations">ChatGPT Is Already Bungling Product Recommendations</a>

Credit Jarred

"Soon people will have AI agents browse, select, purchase and manage on their behalf."

Visa Announces Plans to Give AI Agents Your Credit Card Information

In a world where even our <a href="https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-unveils-new-refrigerator-lineup-equipped-with-screens-and-enhanced-ai-vision-inside-feature">refrigerators</a> have been imbued with AI, it seems nothing good is safe from the perfidious and <a href="https://futurism.com/training-data-ai-misinformation-compromised">error-prone</a> tech.
Not even the beloved World Science Fiction Convention, often known affectionately as Worldcon, is immune to the AI takeover. Worldcon is the <a href="https://www.starburstmagazine.com/features/history-worldcon/">longest running</a> sci-fi gathering on the planet, starting in 1939 and doling out the influential Hugo Awards to literary heavyweights ranging from Kurt Vonnegut to Ursula K. Le Guin.
But now the gathering has hit a huge snafu that sounds, frankly, like the plot of a Hugo-winning tale: in a <a href="https://seattlein2025.org/2025/04/30/statement-from-worldcon-chair-2/">statement</a> about the planning for Seattle Worldcon 2025 later this summer, convention organizers admitted they turned to a large language model (LLM) to select which panelists to program.
"We received more than 1,300 panelist applicants for Seattle Worldcon 2025," the statement read. "Building on the work of previous Worldcons, we chose to vet program participants before inviting them to be on our program."
For context, previous panelists included vaunted sci-fi figures like James Gunn, Cixin Liu, and Jocelyn Bell Burnell.
"In order to enhance our process for vetting, volunteer staff also chose to test a process utilizing a script that used ChatGPT," the team admitted. "The sole purpose of using this LLM was to automate and aggregate the usual online searches for participant vetting, which can take up to 10-30 minutes per applicant as you enter a person’s name, plus the search terms one by one."
The staffers explain that they placed some controls on the LLM, including human review, acknowledging that generative AI "can be unreliable." They note that an expert working in the LLM field found that Worldcon's controls would protect applicants' privacy, but warned that the "process might return false results."
The Worldcon community panned the move on social media, referencing AI's shoddy track record with accuracy, formidable environmental toll, and the overall cavalier approach organizers took to vetting panelists.
"This is very disappointing and I'm consider asking for my membership fees back and not attending," <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/spacecowboybooks.bsky.social/post/3lo4maxvrlk24">retorted Space Cowboy Books</a>, an independent sci-fi bookstore on Bluesky. "WTF, how is this a celebration of writers?!"
"Not sure if being turned down as a panelist for Worldcon feels better or worse knowing the role of AI in the process," <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/mizdoomcookie.bsky.social/post/3lo34asw3rk27">mused Morgan Lockhart</a>, a video game writer and fantasy author.
Others highlighted the contradiction between using AI to save time, while insisting that a human remained in the loop.
"Using this process saved literally hundreds of hours of volunteer staff time," Worldcon's memo stated, "and we believe it resulted in more accurate vetting after the step of checking any purported negative results."
"Did the tool save hundreds of hours, or did humans double check every output?" <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/coil.bsky.social/post/3lo3hs3heik2a">asked one poster</a>. "It's not both."
Major controversies are becoming something of a Worldcon tradition. In 2023, an "<a href="https://gizmodo.com/hugo-awards-2023-eligibility-controversy-apology-china-1851261196">eligibility scandal</a>" rocked the community, after it was revealed that some Hugo-eligible authors were deemed "ineligible" due to vague "political considerations."
Then in 2024, news broke that an anonymous party had <a href="https://www.polygon.com/24204754/hugo-awards-2024-rigging-vote-scandal-worldcon">spent thousands of dollars</a> on fake Worldcon memberships to pack the ballot for a particular author. Out of 3,813 ballots cast, at least 377 were found to be fraudulent.
It's safe to say 2025 will be a standout in the pantheon of Worldcon muckups, at least from a PR point of view. Time will tell whether the organization behind the gathering can top itself in 2026, or reign in its missteps before the whole organization loses its status as the world's premier sci-fi convention.
More on AI: <a href="https://futurism.com/chatgpt-product-recommendations">ChatGPT Is Already Bungling Product Recommendations</a>

Out Of This World

Is nothing sacred?

Worldcon Is Getting Eviscerated for Using AI to Select Panelists

Beyond the obvious characters at the very top of the establishment, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more contentious political figure than Pennsylvania Democrat John Fetterman.
Sporting a Carhartt hoodie and Steve Austin-style goatee, Fetterman rocketed to the national spotlight in 2022 during a <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2022-elections/pennsylvania-senate-results/">closely-contested race</a> for Pennsylvania Senate against quack celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz. Fetterman eked it out with just under 300,000 votes — and then the controversies began almost immediately.
Though he platformed progressive causes like worker's rights and a minimum wage increase, the working-class darling quickly flip-flopped on issues that helped win his election, like <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/18/politics/john-fetterman-pennsylvania-fracking-support-kfile/index.html">fracking</a> and <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/3693848-fetterman-says-it-was-always-absurd-to-talk-about-defunding-police/">police reforms</a>.
He was also soon hit with a near-fatal stroke, which only seemed to accelerate his transformation from progressive idealist to right-wing yes-man — a fact he <a href="https://newrepublic.com/post/182504/john-fetterman-abandon-progressives-bill-maher">bragged about</a> to edgelord pundit Bill Maher, of all people.
"It’s just freeing in a way," Fetterman said of the medical episode, which left him with <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/10/us/politics/john-fetterman-senate-stroke.html">auditory processing issues</a>. "And I just think after beating all of that, I just really want to be able to say the things that I have to really believe in and not be afraid of if there’s any kind of blowback."
Since that interview, the Democratic senator has only <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/18/john-fetterman-democrat-trump-progressive">lurched farther</a> from his original base. Fetterman was among the <a href="https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/john_fetterman/456877">seven Democrats</a> who voted to confirm Trump's pick of Kristi Noem as secretary of homeland security. He's likewise a staunch ally of the <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/netanyahu-gifts-silver-beeper-to-fetterman-who-praised-explosions-in-lebanon/">ultra-right Israeli government</a>, which he "fully supports" reinforcing with US troops. Earlier this year, the senator called Trump's widely-decried plan to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/18/john-fetterman-democrat-trump-progressive">forcefully displace Palestinians</a> from the Gaza Strip a "provocative part of the conversation."
Now a <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/john-fetterman-struggle-mental-health-clinical-depression.html">searing profile in New York Magazine</a> by political writer Ben Terris exposes deep new concerns, often from the people closest to Fetterman, that he's struggling with long-lasting psychological or neurological issues that could explain at least some of his erratic public behavior. As such, the piece raises classic tough questions — not unlike <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/08/us/politics/parkinsons-expert-white-house.html">some faced by former president Joe Biden</a> over a similar period — about the fuzzy lines between cognitive wellbeing, mental health, and the ways that crises in both can cause ideological beliefs and personal behavior to shift in ways both subtle and not.
It was already known that in 2023, Fetterman was diagnosed with <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/02/john-fetterman-has-been-hospitalized-for-depression.html">clinical depression</a>, for which he spent six weeks in inpatient care.
"An aide found Fetterman wandering on Capitol Hill a short time later," during the runup to that incident, Terris wrote. "Worried that he had suffered another stroke, the staffer whisked him to George Washington University Hospital. Doctors there determined there had been no new stroke, but that the 'dizziness and confusion' he’d experienced was partly owed to severe dehydration."
"He could barely string two sentences together, talking so quietly that everyone in the room had to strain to hear him," Terris' account continued. "Fetterman then stood up and began walking around the office in tight loops, a move the two staffers described as doing 'figure eights'... At one point, one of his aides said, he walked into the hallway peering over his shoulder, as if he were being followed by shadowy figures."
Eventually, the senator's chief of staff at the time, Adam Jentleson, penned an urgent letter to the medical director in charge of Fetterman's traumatic-brain-injury and neuropsychiatric care.
"I think John is on a bad trajectory and I'm really worried about him," Jentleson wrote, adding that Fetterman was showcasing a number of red flags that demanded immediate intervention, ranging from not taking his meds and buying a gun to a near-obsession with fast food, which the senator ate "multiple times a day" in spite of his recent stroke.
"He engages in risky behavior," noted Jentleson. "He drives recklessly: he FaceTimes, texts and reads entire news articles while driving — and I don't mean while stopped at a light or something, he reads and FaceTimes while driving at high speeds."
Less than a month after writing the letter, Terris notes, Fetterman caused a <a href="https://www.fox5dc.com/news/senator-fettermans-high-speed-crash-bodycam-footage-released">collision in Maryland</a> involving speeds of "well over the 70 mph speed limit." His Chevy Traverse was destroyed, and his wife suffered spinal fractures.
Throughout 2023 into 2024, Fetterman was likewise exhibiting signs of <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4383161-fetterman-says-social-media-made-his-depression-worse/">growing dependence</a> on social media, despite his doctor's urging him to minimize screentime for the sake of his health. "I think he's on essentially all day now," said Eric Stern, a consultant who worked for Fetterman, adding that the politician was prone to constant "doomscrolling."
As Fetterman's mental and physical health deteriorated, his political statements became overtly violent. "Let's get back to the killing," he <a href="https://newrepublic.com/post/194776/john-fetterman-continue-senate-israel-gaza">said in response</a> to the Israel-Hamas ceasefire earlier this year, advocating to "kill them all." When Israel eventually <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/3/18/why-did-israel-break-the-ceasefire-in-gaza">broke the ceasefire</a> with a salvo that killed over <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/3/18/israel-launches-gaza-assault-killing-hundreds-and-shattering-ceasefire">400 Palestinians</a> — women and children included — Fetterman declared on X-formerly-Twitter, "I will continue to support whatever Israel needs to confront this cowardly terrorism."
Fetterman declined to comment on the record about whether he was still taking his meds or taking "more serious" ones for conditions beyond depression, though he did go off record with Terris for a mysterious four-minute period when pressed on the issue.
How far the rabbit hole goes is anyone's guess, in other words. There are <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/john-fetterman-told-resign-home-state-newspaper-2049708">increasing calls</a> for Fetterman to step down from his role as senator, and <a href="https://www.wesa.fm/politics-government/2025-02-06/fetterman-discontent-pennsylvania-democrats">growing opposition</a> from the voters who put him in office to begin with. Fetterman's term in Congress isn't <a href="https://www.senate.gov/senators/Class_III.htm">officially up</a> until 2029, but at the current rate of decay, it would be at least moderately surprising if he lasted long enough to seek reelection.
Time will tell.
More on brains: <a href="https://futurism.com/cognitive-decay-ai">Man Alarmed as His Cognitive Skills Decay After Outsourcing Them to AI</a>

Hood Up

It's not looking good.

There Are Reportedly Serious Concerns About John Fetterman's Health Following His Stroke

You might have <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n16/john-lanchester/you-are-the-product">heard the famous maxim</a> that "if something is free, you're the product." The freemium world of apps and social media have made it nearly indisputable, heralding a previously unimaginable tech panopticon known as "<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/04/shoshana-zuboff-surveillance-capitalism-assault-human-automomy-digital-privacy">surveillance capitalism</a>."
Surveillance capitalism came about when some <a href="https://longreads.com/2019/09/05/how-google-discovered-the-value-of-surveillance/">crafty software engineers</a> realized that advertisers were willing to pay bigtime for our personal data, which builds up as we surf the web. That data helps <a href="https://www.start.io/blog/understanding-audience-data-a-starter-guide/">advertising corporations</a> "understand their audience" and "deliver highly relevant content," and has expanded into a global data trade as more and more people spend more time online.
The data trade is how social media platforms like Google, YouTube, and TikTok make their bones. In 2022, the <a href="https://edgedelta.com/company/blog/data-market-size-and-forecast">data industry</a> raked in just north of $274 billion worth of revenue. By 2030, it's expected to explode to just under $700 trillion.
And as the data trade expands, so too does the tech behind it. What were once chintzy if endearing tabloid-style popups — "Doctors hate him! See how he reversed his age with one weird trick" — have now become hyper-personalized ads crafted and delivered for very specific groups of users, a system called "social media targeting."
Targeted ads on social media are made possible by analyzing <a href="https://inspiramarketing.com/mastering-precision-the-art-of-social-media-ad-targeting/">four key metrics</a>: your personal info, like gender and age; your interests, like the music you listen to or the comedians you follow; your "off app" behavior, like what websites you browse after watching a YouTube video; and your "psychographics," meaning general trends glossed from your behavior over time, like your social values and lifestyle habits.
The evolution of these metrics is important to understanding the all-consuming nature of surveillance capitalism — even a scathing rant about surveillance capitalism becomes fodder for the machine, as you can clearly see with the ads on this page. When deep-pocketed advertisers are involved, positive and negative traits alike become dollar signs; search terms to be probed, analyzed, and used for profit.
A recent tell-all book by former Facebook insider Sarah Wynn-Williams, titled "<a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250391230/carelesspeople/">Careless People</a>," is blowing the lid on the sheer depravity of the social media giant's targeting machine. Wynn-Williams worked at Facebook — which subsequently changed its name to Meta a few years back — from 2011 to 2017, eventually rising to the role of <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/11/tech/meta-whistleblower-book-sarah-wynn-williams/index.html">public policy director</a>.
As early as 2017, Wynn-Williams writes, Facebook was exploring ways to expand its ad targeting abilities to thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds across Facebook and Instagram — a decidedly vulnerable group, often in the throes of adolescent image and social crises.
Though Facebook's ad algorithms are notoriously opaque, in 2017 <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/digital/facebook-targets-insecure-young-people-to-sell-ads/news-story/a89949ad016eee7d7a61c3c30c909fa6">The Australian alleged</a> that the company had crafted a pitch deck for advertisers bragging that it could exploit "moments of psychological vulnerability" in its users by targeting terms like "worthless," "insecure," "stressed," "defeated," "anxious," "stupid," "useless," and "like a failure."
The social media company likewise tracked when adolescent girls deleted selfies, "so it can serve a beauty ad to them at that moment," according to Wynn-Williams. Other examples of Facebook's ad lechery are said to include the targeting of young mothers based on their emotional state, as well as emotional indexes mapped to racial groups, like a "Hispanic and African American Feeling Fantastic Over-index."
"To me, this type of surveillance and monetization of young teens’ sense of worthlessness feels like a concrete step toward the dystopian future Facebook’s critics had long warned of," Wynn-Williams reflects.
The author says that when the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/01/facebook-advertising-data-insecure-teens">news first broke</a> back in 2017, the executives behind the advertising drive were nonplussed. The company crafted a cookie-cutter statement: "We take this very seriously and are taking every effort to remedy the situation." A junior researcher was fired, "even though that poor researcher was most likely just doing what her bosses wanted... another nameless young woman who was treated as cannon fodder."
And yet, work on this kind of sleezy ad-targeting continued. Wynn-Williams writes that the deputy chief privacy officer at the time confirmed, "not only does Facebook offer this type of customized behavioral targeting," but that "there's a product team working on a tool that would allow advertisers to do this themselves, without Facebook's help."
Wynn-Williams says that, as she worked to wrap her head around her company's sordid revenue model and craft effective PR statements, her bosses raged at the idea that there was any problem with targeting vulnerable youth. (Meta took legal action against the book, <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/meta-facebook-wynn-williams-memoir-blocked">forcing Wynn-Williams to stop promoting it</a>, but that didn't stop it from <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/product-recommendations/books/meta-facebook-memoir-careless-people-preorder-book-1235289691/">becoming a bestseller</a>.)
"This is the business, Sarah. We’re proud of this," one of the top advertising executives told her at the time. "We shout this from the rooftops. This is what puts money in all our pockets. And these statements make it look like it’s something nefarious."
In response to questions about the book, a Meta spokesperson didn't directly Wynn-Williams' claims, but pointed us to a <a href="https://about.fb.com/news/h/comments-on-research-and-ad-targeting/">2017 blog post</a> the company published about The Australian's reporting.
"The premise of the article is misleading," it read. "Facebook does not offer tools to target people based on their emotional state. The analysis done by an Australian researcher was intended to help marketers understand how people express themselves on Facebook. It was never used to target ads and was based on data that was anonymous and aggregated."
The age of surveillance capitalism has brought us many dystopian horrors, which tech researchers and journalists are working tirelessly to uncover. Among them, it seems, is the monetization of despair and insecurity — the skin-crawling epitome of everything that those critics have been saying about surveillance capitalism from the start.
As the philosopher Antonio Gramsci <a href="https://culanth.org/fieldsights/time-of-monsters">wrote from his prison cell</a> in Fascist Italy: "The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters."
More on surveillance capitalism: <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-browser-perplexity-tracking">AI Browser Will Track Every Single Thing You Do, CEO Reveals</a>