South Africa Pulled Its National AI Policy After AI Hallucinated Its Sources
South Africa unveiled a draft national AI policy, journalists found six of its 67 academic citations pointed to articles that do not exist, and the minister withdrew it within three weeks. The episode is a vivid demonstration of what happens when AI is used to produce authoritative documents without the verification steps that would catch its most basic failure mode.
Read full story →From Half-Marathon to Haneda: Humanoid Robots Are Leaving the Lab
In one week: a humanoid robot ran a half-marathon seven minutes faster than any human ever has, Japan Airlines announced a robot baggage handler trial starting this May at Haneda Airport, and Siemens published results from a robot completing an eight-hour factory shift with over 90 percent task accuracy. The demo phase is ending.
Read full story →The Paper Warning Companies: Automate Too Much and You'll Run Out of Customers
A new academic study from Penn and Boston University models why the AI layoff wave could be self-defeating: firms compete to automate, workers lose income, workers are also customers, demand collapses. The troubling part is not that companies don't see it coming: it's that competitive pressure traps them even when they do.
Read full story →When the Customers Run Out
The "AI Layoff Trap" paper finally puts a formal economic model behind what workers have been experiencing without the language to describe it. The mechanism: every individual decision to automate is rational, every firm can see the collective outcome, and competitive pressure traps them in it anyway. The prescription is a Pigouvian tax. I think they have the right diagnosis and the wrong cure.
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