AI could give us our lives back – if we don’t blow it

The other day I pulled into the parking lot of a client’s offices and in the spot next to me was a woman sitting in her car blasting music. She caught me looking and rolled down her window and said, “I’ll be inside in a minute … Just enjoying my last few moments of freedom!”Is this way we want to live? No, it’s not.Elon Musk recently predicted work will be optional. “It’ll be like playing sports or a video game or something like that,” he said. Sounds nice

‘Cruel hoax’ or ‘work-life balance nirvana’: whatever happened to the four-day work week?

It has been years since the four-day work week was floated as a solution to everything from traffic congestion to burnout. So why aren’t we all doing it now?Get our weekend culture and lifestyle emailDuring the global soul-searching that followed the rupture of Covid-19 lockdowns, one idea for how we might live better suddenly seemed plausible: the four-day work week.The model is simple but somewhat counterintuitive. Employees work fewer hours for the same salary while getting the same amount of (or even more) work done. Advocates say this is made possible by reducing meeting times, streamlining workflows and prioritising work more efficiently

Meta and Google trial: are infinite scroll and autoplay creating addicts?

It was as “easy as ABC”, claimed the lawyer prosecuting a landmark social media harm case against Meta and Google which heard closing arguments this week. The defendants were guilty, said Mark Lanier, of “addicting the brains of children”. Not true, replied the tech companies. Meta insisted providing young people with a “safer, healthier experience has always been core to our work”.Features such as autoplay videos, infinite scrolling and constantly chirruping alerts woven into the fabric of online platforms were central to the six-week trial in Los Angeles, which has been compared to the cases against tobacco companies in the 1990s

New study raises concerns about AI chatbots fueling delusional thinking

A new scientific review raises concerns about how chatbots powered by artificial intelligence may encourage delusional thinking, especially in vulnerable people.A summary of existing evidence on artificial intelligence-induced psychosis was published last week in the Lancet Psychiatry, highlighting how chatbots can encourage delusional thinking – though possibly only in people who are already vulnerable to psychotic symptoms. The authors advocate for clinical testing of AI chatbots in conjunction with trained mental health professionals.For his paper, Dr Hamilton Morrin, a psychiatrist and researcher at King’s College in London, analyzed 20 media reports on so-called “AI psychosis”, which describes current theories as to how chatbots might induce or exacerbate delusions.“Emerging evidence indicates that agential AI might validate or amplify delusional or grandiose content, particularly in users already vulnerable to psychosis, although it is not clear whether these interactions can result in the emergence of de novo psychosis in the absence of pre-existing vulnerability,” he wrote

Britain to raise Winter Paralympic targets after finishing Games with solitary medal

UK Sport is set to raise performance targets for the next Winter Paralympics after Great Britain returned from Milano-Cortina with only a single silver medal.ParalympicsGB failed to hit a reduced target of two to five medals in Italy, with only Neil Simpson making the podium following a second-placed finish in the men’s visually impaired alpine combination skiing. On Sunday Simpson did not finish either of his runs in the VI slalom, putting a final end to hopes of further success.UK Sport determines public funding for Olympic and Paralympic sport and their director of performance, Dr Kate Baker, said there was pride to be taken from many performances at the Games. However, she said questions would also have to be asked over the future direction of the British winter Paralympic programme

Grounds for optimism at North Melbourne as emerging talents give glimpse of rosy future | Jonathan Horn

For most of his tenure at North Melbourne, Alastair Clarkson’s eyebrows have been arched in a kind of perma-frown. The bigger the deficit, the steeper the arch.It’s not as though his team has been completely hopeless. Most of the time, they’ve tried their guts out. They’ve just been incredibly frustrating