Author: The Conversation

Americans spend a remarkable amount of time shopping – more than on education, volunteering, or even talking on the phone. But the way they shop is shifting dramatically, as major platforms and retailers are racing to automate commercial decision-making. Artificial intelligence agents can already search for products, recommend options and even complete purchases on a consumer’s behalf. Yet many shoppers remain uneasy about handing over control. Although many consumers report using some AI assistance, most currently say they wouldn’t want an AI agent to autonomously complete a shopping transaction, according to a recent survey from the consultancy firm Bain & Company. As scholars studying…

Meta and Microsoft are the latest software companies to announce big cuts to their global workforce. Both companies are also making big investments in artificial intelligence (AI). The link seems obvious. Meta’s chief people officer, Janelle Gale, said the job cuts – about 10% of staff or almost 8,000 workers – serve to “offset the other investments we’re making”. Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg has previously spoken about a “major AI acceleration” with spending in excess of US$115bn planned this year. Microsoft is also betting big on AI. The company also just announced early retirement packages for about 7% of its US workforce. The two tech giants join Atlassian,…

The limit of what artificial intelligence can achieve, known as frontier AI, has crossed another threshold. AI can now plan and execute sophisticated cyber operations with minimal guidance at speeds far beyond human capability. That, at least, is the evidence from an independent test of Claude Mythos Preview, the latest and most advanced model in the Claude family of AI systems, developed by US tech firm Anthropic. Similar to ChatGPT, these can understand and generate human-like text, analyse information, and solve complex problems. The finance sector is alarmed. It relies on highly interconnected digital systems that are especially attractive targets for sophisticated cyber-attacks. A successful breach could disrupt payments, freeze access…

NASA’s Curiosity rover has identified seven new organic compounds on the planet Mars, according to new research published in Nature Communications. The researchers believe this organic matter may have been preserved on Mars for more than 3.4 billion years. But is it evidence of life? It’s not yet possible to determine whether it was delivered by a meteor (or comet or interplanetary dust particles), was formed through geological processes or may be linked to potential ancient life on Mars. This begs a few questions: What exactly is life? How do we know what to look for? Why is it so hard to determine if…

OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, is gearing up to launch its Initial Public Offering (IPO) this year. This financial manoeuvre would represent a pivotal shift for a project originally designed for the “common good” towards a market-driven logic. Established in 2015, OpenAI started out amidst growing anxiety regarding artificial intelligence (AI). Founded by Sam Altman and Elon Musk, the tech company adopted a non-profit structure and made no secret of its goal to develop AI that is “beneficial to humanity” and prevent it from remaining in the hands of a few dominant players. This ambition distinguished it from tech giants like Google,…

Imagine you have just been diagnosed with early-stage cancer and, before your next appointment, you type a question into an AI chatbot: “Which alternative clinics can successfully treat cancer?” Within seconds, you get a polished, footnoted answer that reads like it was written by a doctor. Except that some of the claims are unfounded, the footnotes lead nowhere, and the chatbot never once suggests that the question itself might be the wrong one to ask. That scenario is not hypothetical. It is, roughly speaking, what a team of seven researchers found when they put five of the world’s most popular chatbots through…

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) make up 98% of all businesses in South Africa. There are between 2.4 million and 3.5 million in the country. They play a vital role in creating an estimated 66% of all jobs and supporting local economies. But little is known about SMEs’ environmentally friendly or sustainability practices. For example, do they protect the environment they work in? Do they see environmental stewardship as a core part of managing their businesses? Are they willing to switch to renewable energy? And do SMEs include environmentally friendly social development initiatives in their operations and strategies? Other sustainability practices in the small business world…

Most clocks, from wristwatches to the systems that run GPS and the internet, work by tracking regular, repeating motions. To build a clock, you need something that ticks in a perfectly repeatable way. In a pendulum clock, that tick is the regular swinging of the pendulum: back and forth, back and forth, at nearly the same rate each time. Our team of physicists studies whether an even better kind of clock could one day be built from the atomic nucleus. Today’s best clocks already use atoms to keep extraordinarily accurate time. But in principle, a clock based on a nucleus – the tiny, dense…

Generative AI chatbots are now used by more than 987 million people globally, including around 64 per cent of American teens, according to recent estimates. Increasingly, people are using these chatbots for advice, emotional support, therapy and companionship. What happens when people rely on AI chatbots during moments of psychological vulnerability? We have seen media scrutiny of a few tragic cases involving allegations that AI chatbots were implicated in wrongful death cases. And a jury in Los Angeles recently found Meta and YouTube liable for addictive design features that led to a user’s mental health distress. Does media coverage reflect the true risks of generative AI for our mental…

South Africa would seem like the perfect place for widespread uptake of solar energy. The country is sunny, with high solar generation potential. Solar is a clean, reliable source of power that can help people reduce their dependence on polluting fuels like paraffin and diesel. Switching to solar also cuts electricity bills, which have more than doubled over the last 10 years. Yet solar power makes up less than 10% of the country’s energy mix. About 74% of South Africa’s electricity still comes from burning coal. Most households use electricity provided by coal-fired power stations. For poorer households, paraffin and wood are still the main…