Author: The Conversation

NASA plans to soon launch a new space telescope that will survey a billion galaxies to trace how the universe evolved over time, all courtesy of America’s spy program and decades of research into detector technology. The telescope, known as the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, was first developed by the National Reconnaissance Office, before being transferred to NASA in 2012. The intelligence agency no longer needed the hardware for its future missions, so it sent the unused telescope to NASA. The space agency spent over a decade making modifications and aims to launch the telescope into space as early as Aug. 30, 2026. Once in position, the…

South Africa introduced a digital social assistance programme in 2020 to identify who was eligible for its Social Relief of Distress grant. The country’s High Court later found that the automated vetting system it relied on was unconstitutional and invalid. The case was brought by the Institute for Economic Justice, a South African think tank, and #PayTheGrants, a civil society movement that advocates for economic justice. The government appealed the decision and the case will be heard by the Supreme Court of Appeal. Legal scholar Mark Gaffley explains the significance of the ruling. How does the system work and why’s there a court case…

Amid all the talk about artificial intelligence (AI) both creating and destroying jobs, a troubling reality flies under the radar. The tasks machines can’t perform well are often offloaded onto marginalised global workers who are struggling in precarious labour markets. They do ostensibly “automated” work under exploitative conditions. Data work is an essential part of building and refining AI systems. Before AI models can “learn” anything, human data workers must categorise, label, test and moderate vast volumes of text, images, audio and video, to make the data usable for AI training. This labour is performed by an expanding global digital workforce that prepares the datasets not…

Amy, a 27-year-old software developer, has struggled with disordered eating since she was a teenager. “But after learning to code, I got much better,” she said in a research interview. “I often code for ten or more hours without stopping.” Her psychiatrist, however, worried that Amy has replaced one compulsive behaviour with another. “Digital addiction” is often used to describe our relationship with smartphones, social media and other digital technologies. This way of thinking suggests that people get “hooked” on digital activity because their body becomes “addicted” to dopamine. It borrows from models of substance addiction: the focus is on the physical need…

Tech giant Meta will pay up to roughly US$18 billion, plus make major design changes to Facebook and Instagram, as part of a settlement it has agreed to in its most recent lawsuit. Filed in 2023 by a coalition of 29 US state attorneys general, the case alleged that Instagram and Facebook were engineered to keep teenagers hooked, that Meta misled the public about the harm, and that it collected data from children under 13 without parental consent. The trial began just over a week ago. But instead of battling it out in court for four more weeks, the parties agreed to settle.…

If you spend any amount of time on LinkedIn, you’ll have certainly come across this type of phrasing: “This isn’t a job, it’s a calling” or “This isn’t marketing, it’s a movement” or “This isn’t a tool, it’s a paradigm shift.” This sentence structure is saturating posts on the platform. It’s become one of the most recognisable patterns of AI-generated text: “It’s not X, it’s Y.” If you’re like me, you find it annoying and scroll past as soon as you read it. Your exasperation is warranted. Negation can be a powerful literary device when used thoughtfully, but when unearned,…

AI is quietly reshaping writing. It’s not just that prose is changing — the very structure of written language is genuinely changing too. It’s not just a new technology. It’s not a fad. It’s an undeniable revolution. Did this article’s introduction seem AI-generated? What made you feel that way? The truth is, it was not AI-generated; I wrote it to emulate synthetic prose, the kind you get when a large language model (LLM) organises words into text. That kind of prose suddenly seems to be everywhere: on low-quality websites built to accumulate advertising clicks, in social media captions chasing engagement, and…

Director James Cameron’s acclaimed sci-fi movie Aliens turns 40 in August. It’s a sequel to Ridley Scott’s claustrophobic breakout hit Alien, made in 1979. Where the original featured one terrifying creature, Cameron’s movie features hundreds – and pits them against a squad of space marines. A host of intriguing technologies make an appearance, including interstellar travel, hypersleep (where humans are preserved in stasis for long space journeys) and terraforming (making other worlds liveable for humans). Some of the technologies in the film have already come to pass – or look likely to soon. But others were missed and some remain firmly in…

“Pics or it didn’t happen” was a thing people used to say online when they wanted to verify a claim. Technology has changed this. We now regularly see a mix of the surreal and the fantastic. World leaders saying things they didn’t. Public figures seemingly endorsing fake products. And disasters that unfold before our eyes but didn’t really happen. Now, anyone can create photorealistic images or videos using AI for a range of purposes. This has changed the nature of visual evidence and our relationship to photos and videos, more broadly. The glut of AI slop we see online is eroding trust in institutions, gobbling up resources, and scamming…

Ever used or thought of using artificial intelligence (AI) for financial advice? Is it a good idea? Anyone with the internet access, even on their phone, can access AI. Tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity are free, instant, and easy to use. They can break down complex financial concepts and provide financial solutions in seconds. But can they safely guide a user through a nuanced, high-stakes financial crisis? Our recent research explored this question, drawing on our financial planning and consumer behaviour expertise. We evaluated how three open-access AI models handled the financial queries of users whose personal situations put them at risk of harm. To…