How to deal with Zoom calls in 2025: in smaller groups with static backgrounds

Whether it’s a social catch-up with colleagues, or assembling to set new year objectives, many of us will be reconnecting via Zoom, Teams or Google Meet come Monday morning. Yet while such platforms have revolutionised flexible and remote working in recent years, scientists are increasingly waking up to the negative toll they can take on people’s energy levels and self-esteem. So how can we forge a healthier relationship with videoconferencing in 2025?Relatively early during the pandemic, psychologists coined the phrase “Zoom fatigue” to describe the physical and psychological exhaustion that can come from spending extended periods on videoconferencing platforms such as Zoom. It was found that people who have more and longer meetings using the technology, or have more negative attitudes towards them, tend to feel more exhausted by them.Further studies have linked the use of the self view function, which allows you to control whether your video is displayed on your screen during a meeting, to greater levels of fatigue

Football coaches could soon be calling on AI to scout the next superstar

Football coaches desperate to boost their team’s performance could soon find an answer in an artificial intelligence system aimed at conjuring the next superstar.A kind of sporting Aladdin’s lamp is within reach, technologists claim, which could allow managers to simply wish for a new player with the aggression of Erling Haaland or the poise of Jude Bellingham and for an AI to suggest the perfect prospect.A system that uses video and automated tracking to monitor the performances of nearly 180,000 mostly teenage footballers around the world underpins the services of Eyeball, a digital scouting company that already has relationships with more than a dozen Premier League clubs and other elite teams in Europe and North America.Using what it claims is the largest video database of global youth football – with players logged from 28 countries – the company says it can now determine which young players most fit the description of current or recent top stars as defined by one of eight archetypes. These include the ideal “box-to-box midfielder”, “modern No 9”, “playmaking No 10” and “inverted wing-back”

Meta is killing off its own AI-powered Instagram and Facebook profiles

Meta is deleting Facebook and Instagram profiles of AI characters the company created over a year ago after users rediscovered some of the profiles and engaged them in conversations, screenshots of which went viral.The company had first introduced these AI-powered profiles in September 2023 but killed off most of them by summer 2024. However, a few characters remained and garnered new interest after the Meta executive Connor Hayes told the Financial Times late last week that the company had plans to roll out more AI character profiles.“We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do,” Hayes told the FT. The automated accounts posted AI-generated pictures to Instagram and answered messages from human users on Messenger

Nick Clegg has sold almost $19m in Meta shares since joining Facebook in 2018

Nick Clegg made almost $19m from the sale of shares in Meta during his six-year term at the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, filings show.The former British deputy prime minister had sold $18.4m (£14.8m) worth of shares in the group before announcing on Thursday that he was leaving his role as its president of global affairs and communications.His total pay at Meta has not been disclosed but he still holds almost 39,000 of the company’s shares, worth about $21m at their current price

‘Godfather’ of artificial intelligence has a surprising blindspot | Letters

Prof Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather  of artificial intelligence”, states that he struggles to find examples of “more intelligent thing[s] being controlled by … less intelligent thing[s]”; the mother-baby relationship is the only example he can cite (‘Godfather of AI’ shortens odds of the technology wiping out humanity over next 30 years, 27 December). This seems a strange outbreak of aspect blindness, especially given Hinton’s specialism.Many theorists (Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Jane Bennett, Bruno Latour and others) offer persuasive arguments showing how (to borrow from Freud) “man is not master in his own house”: human behaviour is continually, at times conspicuously, regulated by non-human drivers, many of them seemingly pretty dumb. Coronaviruses offer a topical example. The present barely regulated rise of AI is unarguably scary, but dealing with it effectively will involve humans getting real about their non-mastery of all they survey and interrogating the ways that stuff (both smart and dumb) controls us, as well as vice-versa

Musk accused of ‘politicising’ rape of young girls in UK to attack Starmer

Elon Musk has “politicised” the rape of young girls in the UK in an attempt to attack Keir Starmer, a former health worker who exposed a major paedophile ring has told the Guardian.Sara Rowbotham, who gathered evidence that led to the imprisonment of nine men in Rochdale, said the tech billionaire had launched a “political swipe” at the prime minister that overlooked the plight of abuse survivors.The Tesla owner, who will have a key role in Donald Trump’s incoming administration, on Friday called on King Charles to step in and dissolve parliament after Labour rejected a call for a national inquiry into child grooming.Musk triggered the row on Thursday over Starmer’s handling of child abuse in Oldham after he suggested the prime minister had failed to bring “rape gangs” to justice when he was director of public prosecutions.Rowbotham, who made hundreds of referrals detailing the abuse and sexual grooming while working for the NHS in Rochdale between 2005 and 2011, said: “What is [Musk’s] motivation for interfering? It seems very political