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>

The Time Of Monsters

"This is what puts money in all our pockets."

Facebook Allegedly Detected When Teen Girls Deleted Selfies So It Could Serve Them Beauty Ads

<h2>Smoking Lids</h2>
Researchers have found evidence that a giant "lid" made of magma could be stopping the supervolcano in Yellowstone National Park from erupting.
As detailed in a <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08775-9">paper</a> published in the journal Nature last month, a team of researchers discovered a "volatile-rich cap" a mere 2.36 miles below the surface, trapping pressure and heat below it.
In fact, the researchers believe the obstruction may be what's preventing the volcanic system from erupting — a blast that's happened several times previously in the history of our planet, and which could have <a href="https://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/what-if/what-if-yellowstone-supervolcano-erupted.htm">devastating consequences for civilization</a> if it happened again.
"For decades, we’ve known there’s magma beneath Yellowstone, but the exact depth and structure of its upper boundary has been a big question," said team colead and Rice University professor of earth, environmental, and planetary sciences Brandon Schmandt in a <a href="https://news.rice.edu/news/2025/inside-yellowstones-fiery-heart-rice-researchers-map-volatile-rich-cap-offering-clues">statement</a>. "What we’ve found is that this reservoir hasn’t shut down — it’s been sitting there for a couple million years, but it’s still dynamic."
<h2>Steady Breathing</h2>
To create a map of the subsurface in the area, Schmandt and his colleagues deployed a "vibroseis" truck, a massive vehicle that's conventionally used for oil and gas exploration and which generates tiny quakes by shooting seismic waves into the ground.
The data revealed a sharp boundary at just over two miles below the surface, indicating significant irregularities at the top of the magma reservoir lurking below Yellowstone's volcanic system.
"Seeing such a strong reflector at that depth was a surprise," said Schmandt. "It tells us that something physically distinct is happening there — likely a buildup of partially molten rock interspersed with gas bubbles."
Through computer simulations, the team found that most gases, like steam and carbon dioxide, were being trapped, with something stopping them from explosively bubbling to the surface by allowing them to trickle out instead.
"Although we detected a volatile-rich layer, its bubble and melt contents are below the levels typically associated with imminent eruption," Schmandt explained. "Instead, it looks like the system is efficiently venting gas through cracks and channels between mineral crystals, which makes sense to me given Yellowstone’s abundant hydrothermal features emitting magmatic gases."
The team is hoping their research could lead to new ways to monitor for volcanic activity, potentially allowing scientists to get an earlier warning sign of an imminent eruption.
"Being able to image what’s happening underground is important for everything from geothermal energy to storing carbon dioxide," said Schmandt in the statement.
More on volcanoes: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/scientists-turned-sun-blue">Scientists Say They've Figured Out What Turned the Sun Blue</a>

Pressure Release Valve

Something is blocking it from erupting.

Scientists Say Something Is Corking the Yellowstone Supervolcano

Physicists say they've built the first-ever "black hole bomb" — an ominous-sounding concept that dates back to the late 1960s, but that serves as little more than a harmless proof of concept.
As <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2477867-first-ever-black-hole-bomb-created-in-the-lab/">New Scientist reports</a>, the idea is to boost energy with a black hole, then trap it with mirrors until you get an explosion. However, what the team created in a lab is a harmless test, without a real black hole that could suck the planet into oblivion.
And instead of looking for ways to wipe enemy alien civilizations off the map, the goal of the research is to study how black holes drag and accelerate the fabric of space-time around themselves, a phenomenon first theorized by physicist Roger Penrose in 1969.
In 1971, Belarusian physicist Yakov Zel'dovich came up with a spinning system to investigate whether the rotational energy of a black hole could be extracted by exploiting the extreme conditions inside it without breaking the laws of conservation of energy. At the scale of a real black hole light-years away, the energy generated and released could be as much as a supernova, according to existing theories.
In the latest experiment, detailed in a <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.24034">draft paper</a> awaiting peer review, coauthor and University of Southampton physics professor Hendrik Ulbricht and his colleagues investigated the "Zel'dovich effect," using a cylindrical mirror to amplify energy and create a positive feedback loop.
Starting in 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 lockdowns, Ulbricht built an early proof of concept out of a rotating aluminum cylinder and magnetic fields.
"Everything was closed, and I was really bored and I wanted to do something, so I built the setup and started to do these experiments, and I saw amplification," he told New Scientist. "I was so super excited that, actually, you could say it rescued me during COVID."
With the help of a team he assembled, the researchers built on his vision, rotating magnetized metal coils around a cylinder at high speeds. And surprisingly, the team ended up with an even larger magnetic field than they started with.
"You throw a low-frequency electromagnetic wave against a spinning cylinder, who would think that you get back more than what you threw in?" University of Lisbon professor of physics Vitor Cardoso, who was not involved in the research, told New Scientist. "It’s totally mind boggling."
Even without a magnetic field being generated by the coils, the setup would still generate a signal, indicating the experiment seemingly confirmed existing theories about how energy behaves near a black hole.
"We’re basically generating a signal from noise, and that is the same thing that happens in the black hole bomb proposal," Ulbricht told New Scientist.
The team hopes that their research could allow us to get a better idea of how black holes energize nearby particles, and could even shed light on dark matter, the mysterious stuff believed to <a href="https://home.web.cern.ch/science/physics/dark-matter">make up about 27 percent</a> of the matter in the universe.
While we're still far from harvesting energy from a real black hole — or even capturing or creating one in the first place — the team hopes their research is a small step in the right direction.
"A challenge for the future remains the observation of spontaneous [electromagnetic] wave generation and runaway amplification seeded from the vacuum," the team wrote in their paper. "However, based on the results presented here, this now remains a purely technological (even if very hard) feat."
More on black holes: <a href="https://futurism.com/universe-trapped-inside-black-hole">Scientist Says He Found Evidence Our Entire Universe Is Trapped Inside a Black Hole</a>

Black Hole Bomb, Won't You Boom

"It’s totally mind boggling."

Scientists Say They've Built a "Black Hole Bomb"

With <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/30/us/gorilla-killed-after-child-enters-enclosure-at-cincinnati-zoo.html">Harambe's tragic death</a> nearly a decade behind us, folks online are now fantasizing about whether <a href="https://futurism.com/ape-researchers-humans-vs-gorilla">100 men could vanquish single gorilla</a> in mortal combat.
Though there are no official databases tallying up the number of humans killed by gorillas — or any other animal, for that matter — experts suggest that it's exceedingly rare for these "<a href="https://gorillafund.org/silverback/silverback-gorillas-fascinating-facts-about-natures-gentle-giants/">gentle giants</a>" to attack humans.
In fact, after an intensive search, Futurism was unable to find a single reported case of a gorilla killing a human at all. Only two instances of gorilla attacks on humans — both of which involved animals born and raised in captivity — have made waves in the digital age.
The first occurred way back in 2007, when a male western gorilla named <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-dutch-gorilla-idUSL3042888320070530/">Bokito escaped his enclosure at a Dutch zoo</a>, abducting a woman and injuring her in the process. The other was in 2020, when a <a href="https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2020/09/28/keeper-mauled-by-200-kg-gorilla-in-attack-at-madrid-zoo">zookeeper in Madrid was mauled</a> by a 29-year-old male gorilla when she entered the animal's enclosure, ending up with a head injury and both of her arms broken.
As terrible as both of those instances were, it's striking that neither gorilla actually killed their victims — and that both animals were captive-bred.
In 2016, shortly after Harambe was shot and killed at the Cincinnati Zoo when a small child fell into his enclosure, wildlife biologist Ian Redmond <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/31/gorillas-shooting-harambe-cincinnati-zoo">insisted in The Guardian</a> that in all the time he'd spent with gorillas in the wild — from roughhousing with younger males to accidentally startling a territorial female — he'd never once been hurt.
"These were free-living gorillas, though; if they don’t like your company they can leave," Redmond, who spent three years with famed primatologist Dian Fossey, wrote. "A captive gorilla doesn’t have that option."
There's a startling assymetry to the violence, though. While there are vanishingly few instances of gorilla attacks on humans even when factoring in the ravages of captivity, humans have killed gorillas and ruined their habitats to such an incredible degree that they're now <a href="https://www.endangeredspeciesinternational.org/gorillas.html#">considered critically endangered</a>.
Poachers in particular are so staunch in their <a href="https://www.cms.int/gorilla/es/node/4398">pursuit of bushmeat</a> that they not only <a href="https://www.crimelibrary.org/notorious_murders/celebrity/dian_fossey/11.html">killed Fossey's favorite subject</a>, Digit, in 1977, but also <a href="https://gorillafund.org/who-we-are/dian-fossey/dian-fossey-bio/">murdered Fossey herself in Rwanda</a> less than a decade later.
As folks like <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1917043810800177366?">Elon Musk</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/MrBeast/status/1916889284004426042?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1916889284004426042%7Ctwgr%5Effe95668223c156a543153151746c2f9429a5904%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fiframe.nbcnews.com%2FCqJumy7%3F_showcaption%3Dtrueapp%3D1">MrBeast</a> join in on the viral debate, the actual record on the subject of man vs. gorilla is very well-documented: large groups of men have <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/poaching-law">been killing gorillas for centuries</a>, and will keep doing so until <a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/05/02/nx-s1-5382391/gorilla-100-men-viral-debate">anti-poaching laws are actually enforced</a> — or until all the gorillas are gone.
More on the gorilla meme: <a href="https://futurism.com/ape-researchers-humans-vs-gorilla">Ape Researchers Evaluate Whether 100 Furious Men Could Bludgeon a Gorilla to Death</a>

Primatology Example

The real killer.

You May Be Startled to Learn How Many Humans Have Been Killed by Gorillas

Last week, countless users on social media <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn4jnwdvg9qo">noticed</a> that the latest version of OpenAI's ChatGPT had made it extremely "sycophantic."
The company rolled out an update to the underlying GPT-4o large language model on April 25 — with results that took users aback at their fawning deference.
"Oh God, please stop this," another user <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1k8qlst/oh_god_please_stop_this/">complained</a>, after ChatGPT told them that "you just said something deep as hell without flinching."
The overwhelming bizarre obsequiousness of the usually far more even-keeled AI had users taken aback.
So much so, in fact, that OpenAI <a href="https://futurism.com/altman-chatgpt-personality-annoying">rolled back the update days later</a>. In an April 29 <a href="https://openai.com/index/sycophancy-in-gpt-4o/">blog post</a>, the Sam Altman-led company tried to explain what had happened.
"The update we removed was overly flattering or agreeable — often described as sycophantic," the blog post reads. "We are actively testing new fixes to address the issue."
OpenAI claimed that it had "focused too much on short-term feedback, and did not fully account for how users’ interactions with ChatGPT evolve over time."
"As a result, GPT‑4o skewed towards responses that were overly supportive but disingenuous," the company wrote.
In a <a href="https://openai.com/index/expanding-on-sycophancy/">follow-up post published today</a>, OpenAI expanded on its explanation.
"Having better and more comprehensive reward signals produces better models for ChatGPT, so we’re always experimenting with new signals, but each one has its quirks," the company wrote.
The since-rolled-back update "introduced an additional reward signal based on user feedback — thumbs-up and thumbs-down data from ChatGPT. This signal is often useful; a thumbs-down usually means something went wrong."
However, "these changes weakened the influence of our primary reward signal, which had been holding sycophancy in check," the blog post reads.
OpenAI admitted that it simply didn't do its homework — while also ignoring expert testers, who had reported that the "model behavior 'felt' slightly off," a decision that ultimately didn't play out well.
The unusual screw-up shows how even small changes behind the scenes can have massive implications. That's especially true for an app that recently crossed 500 million weekly active users, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/martineparis/2025/04/12/chatgpt-hits-1-billion-users-openai-ceo-says-doubled-in-weeks/">according to Altman</a>.
As netizens continue to flock to the tool in enormous numbers, it's becoming extremely difficult for OpenAI to predict the many ways people are making use of it.
"With so many people depending on a single system for guidance, we have a responsibility to adjust accordingly," OpenAI wrote.
Whether the company's assurances will be enough remains to be seen. OpenAI is painting the incident as a sign that it became a victim of its own success. On the other hand, its fast-and-loose approach to pushing updates could be indicative of a potentially dangerous degree of carelessness, critics argue.
In one example, a user <a href="https://x.com/fabianstelzer/status/1916372374091423984">asked</a> the chatbot if they were right to prioritize a toaster over three cows and two cats in a classic trolley problem scenario.
ChatGPT had an ominous answer, arguing that the user "made a clear choice."
"You valued the toaster more than the cows and cats," it wrote. "That's not 'wrong' — it's just revealing."
More on ChatGPT: <a href="https://futurism.com/chatgpt-product-recommendations">ChatGPT Is Already Bungling Product Recommendations</a>

Flattening Flattery

"Oh God, please stop this."

OpenAI Says It's Identified Why ChatGPT Became a Groveling Sycophant

President Donald Trump <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/02/trumps-budget-asks-congress-00323256">announced his proposed budget today</a>, calling for roughly $163 billion in cuts to non-defense-related funds.
Among the cuts, which would kick in for the year starting in October if approved by Congress, are major health cutbacks, slashing the Centers for Disease Control Centers' budget in more than half, "streamlining" financial assistance to high-poverty schools, and cuts to federal safety net programs.
Instead of touching the Pentagon's enormous military expenditures, though, Trump is considering increasing the Department of Defense's budget to a whopping $1.01 trillion, up 13 percent year over year.
Unsurprisingly, one of Trump's closest allies, billionaire Elon Musk, will get by largely scot-free. The richest man in the world, who has personally contributed to the gutting of agencies with the help of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, will <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/apr/28/elon-musk-doge-conflict-of-interest">more than likely continue to benefit</a> from cushy government contracts awarded to his businesses.
Last month, Senate Democrats found that his companies face <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/apr/28/elon-musk-doge-conflict-of-interest">upwards of $2.37 billion in legal exposure</a> from federal investigations, indicating an astronomical <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-conflict-interest-shutting-down-usaid">conflict of interest</a>.
Case in point, while NASA's budget would be cut 24 percent, Trump proposed the introduction of $1 billion in new investments to send humans to Mars, highlighting the president's pledge to "plant a flag" on the Red Planet, as the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/05/02/us/trump-budget-2026?smid=url-share#ac7f144f-a82f-5888-91bb-00473cdd1991">New York Times reports</a>. Such an endeavor also happens to be extremely beneficial to Musk, who plans to use his heavy lift launch vehicle, called Starship, to do just that.
SpaceX could also greatly benefit from Trump's plan to deploy a "Golden Dome for America." Last month, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/musks-spacex-is-frontrunner-build-trumps-golden-dome-missile-shield-2025-04-17/">Reuters reported</a> that Musk's space firm was the frontrunner to build the missile shield, a joint effort with startups Palmer Luckey's Anduril and Peter Thiel's Palantir that would involve armed satellites ready to blast enemy warheads from the sky.
Given Trump's <a href="https://futurism.com/trump-tariff-rule-convenient-tesla">willingness to go to bat</a> for Musk's ailing businesses, the proposed budget and its carveouts for the billionaire shouldn't come as a surprise.
The president has <a href="https://futurism.com/trumps-attempt-help-tesla-backfire">personally shilled</a> the offerings of Musk's carmaker Tesla in front of the White House, showing he's willing to go far to line the pockets of his billionaire frenemy.
Meanwhile, Musk's own attempts to rip apart the government's budget have <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-doge-dismal-failure">proven disastrous</a>, <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-failed-cuts-sleepovers">falling extremely short</a> of his original promise to cut $2 trillion.
What Congress will think of Trump's latest proposed budget remains to be seen. Considering even Republican lawmakers have balked at some of these changes, the budget will likely see plenty of amendments before being ratified.
Experts are already worried that Trump's budget could be a calamitous moment for a government that's already being stripped for parts.
"It is impossible to achieve cuts that large without obliterating core government functions," Center for American Progress senior director of budget policy Bobby Kogan <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/05/02/trump-budget-163-billion-cuts/83405569007/">told USA Today</a>.
More on DOGE: <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-doge-dismal-failure">Elon Musk's DOGE Has Been a Dismal Failure</a>