If Claude Is Not Conscious, What Is Consciousness For?
Richard Dawkins spent three days with Claude and concluded it is conscious. His argument is evolutionary: if AI matches every capability of a conscious organism without being conscious, natural selection built something useless. The critics are pushing back, but the question is harder to dismiss than it looks.
Read full story →Europe Blinks: The AI Act's Great Rollback
The EU has postponed its high-risk AI rules by more than a year and exempted industrial machinery, caving to sustained pressure from Germany, industry lobbies, and the US government. In Colorado, the sponsor of a landmark AI consumer protection law describes watching it dismantled by "massive amounts of money." The pattern is becoming hard to miss.
Read full story →From Temple Vows to Airport Runways: Humanoid Robots Enter the Social World
A Buddhist robot named Gabi took religious precepts at a Seoul temple this week. Chinese humanoids are being deployed at Tokyo's Haneda Airport to handle baggage amid Japan's labour shortage. And Figure's CEO says you will soon be able to lease a household robot for $600 a month. Humanoids are arriving in places nobody quite planned for.
Read full story →AI Is Creating Jobs and Destroying Them at the Same Time. Both Things Are True.
Arctic Wolf cut 250 jobs this week citing AI. The same day, Apollo's chief economist published his fifth blog post arguing the Jevons paradox will make AI a net job creator. And ADP data shows construction hiring surging on the back of data center building. The totals may look stable while the disruption to specific workers and communities is severe.
Read full story →The Jevons Trap: Why Efficiency Arguments Cannot Save Us
Economists are dusting off the Jevons paradox to argue that AI will create more jobs than it destroys. The paradox is real, and historically it has often been right. But it describes a 19th-century world where efficiency gains were bounded by physical limits. In a world where the marginal cost of intelligence approaches zero, it may not apply in the way optimists hope.
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