Is it smarter to have a dumb home? ‘We’ve seen clients unable to flush toilets’

When the smart home devices Elly Bailey was expecting in the post never showed up at her Gold Coast home, she was frustrated. As a technology reviewer, these products were crucial for her work.When she eventually found the cause, she had to laugh. It wasn’t a sticky-fingered neighbour or a rogue delivery driver causing her to miss parcels but her smart doorbell – the very thing she’d hoped would prevent missed deliveries, and part of exactly the range of internet-connected devices she was meant to be reviewing.“It’s pretty funny,” says Bailey, 33, who goes by the handle @ellyawesome on TikTok, where she has more than 1

The bogus four-day workweek that AI supposedly ‘frees up’

The front-page headline in a recent Washington Post was breathless: “These companies say AI is key to their four-day workweeks.” The subhead was euphoric: “Some companies are giving workers back more time as artificial intelligence takes over more tasks.”As the Post explained: “more companies may move toward a shortened workweek, several executives and researchers predict, as workers, especially those in younger generations, continue to push for better work-life balance.”Hurray! There’s utopia at the end of the AI rainbow! A better work-life balance!You may have come across similar articles in Fortune magazine and the New York Times. The AI spin brigade is in full force

Hazardous substances found in all headphones tested by ToxFREE project

You wear them at work, you wear them at play, you wear them to relax. You may even get sweaty in them at the gym.But an investigation into headphones has found every single pair tested contained substances hazardous to human health, including chemicals that can cause cancer, neurodevelopmental problems and the feminisation of males.Even products by market-leading brands such as Bose, Panasonic, Samsung and Sennheiser were found to contain harmful chemicals in the formulation of the plastics from which they are made.Campaigners condemned “a market-wide failure” as they called for broad bans on whole classes of endocrine-disrupting chemicals in consumer goods and greater transparency from manufacturers about what is in their products

Tech billionaires fly in for Delhi AI expo as Modi jostles to lead in south

Silicon Valley tech billionaires will land in Delhi this week for an AI summit hosted by India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, where leaders of the global south will wrestle for control over the fast-developing technology.During the week-long AI Impact Summit, attended by thousands of tech executives, government officials and AI safety experts, tech companies valued at trillions of dollars will rub along with leaders of countries such as Kenya and Indonesia, where average wages dip well below $1,000 a month.Amid a push to speed up AI adoption across the globe, Sundar Pichai, Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, the heads of Google, OpenAI and Anthropic, will all be there. Rishi Sunak and George Osborne, a former British prime minister and a former chancellor, will each be pushing for greater adoption of AI. Sunak has taken jobs for Microsoft and Anthropic and Osborne leads OpenAI’s push to deepen and widen the use of ChatGPT beyond its existing 800 million users

Palantir moves headquarters to Miami amid tech’s growing retreat to Florida

Palantir announced on Tuesday that it has moved its headquarters to Miami from Denver. The data analytics company, criticized for its role in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, joins a host of other businesses and billionaires that recently moved to Florida in search of a more business-friendly climate.Palantir’s move across state lines comes after its chair, Peter Thiel, announced on 31 December that he opened a Miami office for his private investment firm. Thiel already has a mansion in Miami Beach. The company, previously headquartered in Palo Alto, announced the move on X but did not provide further details or respond to a request for comment

AI’s workplace revolution is here – and anxiety is rising with it

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, The Guardian’s US tech editor, writing to you while cheering on Team USA in the Winter Olympics.Throughout 2026, The Guardian will publish a series of stories about how artificial intelligence is affecting modern labor. We’re calling it Reworked: A series about what’s at stake as AI disrupts our jobs.Our first story published this morning