Author: The Conversation

AI is beginning to influence how boards of directors make decisions in South African companies. Directors use it to do things like assess financial information, predict market trends or identify potential risks before making strategic decisions. But there is a problem. South African company law does not regulate its use by boards. This matters in relation to the rules governing directors’ duties and responsibilities. Many countries already regulate AI through binding legislation. For example, the European Union, South Korea and Vietnam adopted comprehensive AI laws. Other countries such as China introduced more targeted AI regulations. As a company law researcher, in a recent paper I looked at four company law…

In August 2026, Meta agreed to one of the largest consumer protection settlements in American history. The settlement resolves claims from 47 states alleging that Meta intentionally designed its Facebook and Instagram platforms to be addictive to young users and harmful to youth mental health. As part of the settlement, Meta agreed to pay up to US$17.1 billion – approximately 20% of Meta’s 2025 pretax profits – in penalties over the next 10 years. Meta also agreed to implement changes to its platforms for young users, including daily time limits, access restrictions during school hours and late nights, and “productivity breaks” that interrupt scrolling every 60…

Over the weekend, Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei called for artificial intelligence (AI) companies, including his own, to slow down their work. Sam Altman and Elon Musk, heads of rivals OpenAI and xAI respectively, agreed. The move reflects concern across the AI industry and more broadly about the dangers of new, rapidly improving systems. Recent high-profile incidents such as OpenAI AI agents hacking another company and hijacking a public website have shown current systems can break out of safety confines – and even more capable systems are in development. Further complicating AI safety is the tension between safety and performance. Companies will be reluctant to limit the performance…

Earlier this week, researcher Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic, saying the firm and its competitors are “gambling with our lives”. “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans,” added current Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger in a post on X. Coxon isn’t the first to down tools over fears of AI doom. The idea that AI could wipe out humanity, advanced in Nick Bostrom’s 2014 book Superintelligence and the influential LessWrong forum, has long circulated among researchers. There are many scenarios for how this could happen, but the core idea is that AI smarter than humans could escape our control and destroy us. I resigned from…

Imagine a manager sends a thoughtful message to one of her hard-working employees after a particularly exhausting week in the office. The message communicates personal warmth, but when the recipient discovers it was generated by AI, it somehow feels less genuine. In the past, the recipient would only have discovered AI use if the sender disclosed it or through a lucky guess. Now, the European Union’s new transparency rules require companies to watermark content produced by generative AI systems in a machine-readable format. Systems already on the market have until December 2026 to comply. OpenAI reportedly developed such a watermarking system for ChatGPT…

There is a temptation to divide the future of artificial intelligence (AI) into two possibilities: utopia or catastrophe. Neither extreme is particularly helpful. The more interesting possibility is messier – and requires a step-shift in our thinking, from artificial intelligence to AI societies. When most people hear “AI”, they typically think of ChatGPT, Copilot or another conversational system. You ask a question, that system generates an answer. But AI is rapidly moving beyond this. Systems can now monitor the world, make decisions, negotiate transactions and carry out tasks over extended periods of time. AI is no longer just generating an answer – it is…

OpenAI has announced that one of its unreleased artificial intelligence (AI) models has found an answer to one of the biggest open questions in mathematics, the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem. The Millennium Prizes offer million-dollar rewards for solutions to seven notoriously difficult mathematical puzzles, and until now only one had been solved. Mathematical problems at this level are extremely complex. A solution to the similarly difficult ABC conjecture ran to more than 500 pages, and it took mathematicians six years to understand it enough to spot potential flaws. Researchers can devote entire careers to these problems, in the hopes of getting close to a solution.…

The South African government has released a new electricity pricing policy for the first time in 18 years. The policy sets rules that the national energy regulator, the state-owned electricity utility Eskom and municipalities must follow when working out electricity prices. The policy explains which costs can be recovered from customers and how these charges should appear on electricity bills. Its aim is to ensure that prices are fair and clear, while bringing in enough money to maintain the electricity system and support poor households. It also updates the pricing rules to reflect major changes since the last policy was released in 2008. Recent changes…

It is two decades since Facebook introduced the News Feed – letting loose a world in which algorithms would shape ever more of our lives. In 2006, Facebook was facing something of a crisis. Its internal data suggested that for the first time since its launch two years earlier (as TheFacebook), the company had stopped growing. People weren’t joining, and existing users weren’t spending more time on the site. The solution co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and colleagues came up with, the News Feed, meant individual users’ homepages would be automatically updated with information tailored to them – in particular, new posts their Facebook friends had added.…

What do the water system in Flint, Michigan, the electrical grid in Puerto Rico, and your search engine have in common? They are all critical infrastructure – systems essential to everyday life. People expect critical infrastructure to be reliable, to minimise risk and to promote public well-being. When it fails – such as when lead seepage poisoned Flint’s water supply in 2014, or when nearly all of Puerto Rico’s power went out on New Year’s Eve in 2024 – the public expects risks to be mitigated and problems to be addressed. Today’s critical infrastructure includes food and water systems, roads and bridges, and financial and…