Fresh robotic hell
On a scale of one to 10, just how desperate do you think Kim Kardashian is for attention? Judging by the billionaire’s weirdly sexual photoshoot with a robot, the answer may be an 11. The entrepreneur and influencer, who is a big Tesla fan, recently posed with the company’s Optimus bot in a Tesla Cybercab (a self-driving taxi) for a series of photos which might be described as avant-garde if you’re being polite, and dystopian thirst traps if you’re not. She also posted some rather less sultry videos of her interacting with the humanoid robot.
The photoshoot has ignited something of a debate online about whether Kardashian is deliberately aligning herself with Elon Musk, who runs Tesla, and outing herself as a Trump supporter. Which is a bit of a stretch really as I’m not sure that – with the exception of an admirable stint working on criminal justice reform – Kardashian has ever pretended to be a leftist. Kardashian is a billionaire who has been sued for unfair labor practices and who announced, back in 2018, that she has “nothing bad to say” about Trump. Her Tesla-themed photoshoot was hardly a radical new direction for her.
It is, however, a sign of the “autonomous everything” direction in which we’re headed. The world’s most famous influencer cozying up to a robot in a self-driving taxi is yet another example of how AI-powered autonomous technology is slowly marching into our lives.
When it comes to Tesla’s Optimus robot, of course, the operative word here is slowly. The robot, which isn’t available for sale to the general public yet, may look flashy but it isn’t clear just how sophisticated it actually is yet. The Optimus robots were a major part of Tesla’s Cybercab reveal in October, serving drinks to the crowd and even chatting with them – as it turns out, however, these “cutting-edge” robots were actually being remotely controlled by humans. Which is a step up, I suppose, from when Musk unveiled plans for a “Tesla Bot” in 2021 by bringing out a human in a robot suit who proceeded to breakdance to electronic music.
Musk has been talking a big game about human-replacement robots for a long time, saying they’re being designed to do “boring, repetitious and dangerous” work. The tech billionaire, who has a habit of wildly overpromising what he is capable of, also keeps telling us they’re going to be released any day now. In 2021, for example, he suggested the “Tesla bot” would launch in 2022. Earlier this year he claimed Tesla will produce “genuinely useful” humanoid robots to start working in its factories next year and plans to roll them out to other companies in 2026. I wouldn’t hold your breath that this will actually happen.
Which is not to say, however, that development of these sorts of robots is a long way away. Robotic dogs, made by Boston Dynamics, are already being deployed by police departments and one has been guarding Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Deadlier versions of these dogs are also in the works: the US army has reportedly sent at least one “robot dog” armed with an artificial intelligence-enabled gun turret to Saudi Arabia for testing.
More generally, military use of AI-enabled weaponry is booming, fundamentally changing the nature of warfare. Gaza is currently a real-life testing field for some of this tech: earlier this year, one Israeli intelligence officer told the Guardian that powerful AI systems “made it easier” to kill people and destroy homes. And while robot dogs may not be in Gaza yet, numerous eyewitnesses have said that the Israeli military is using sniper drones – quadcopters with rifles attached to them – and they’re shooting civilians and children.
Are the people developing autonomous weapons kept up at night with worry about how their technology might be abused? Palmer Luckey, the billionaire founder of Anduril, the artificial intelligence weapons company, certainly doesn’t seem to be. In a recent conversation with Pepperdine University’s president, Jim Gash, Luckey enthused about how society needs a “warrior class that is enthused and excited about enacting violence on others in pursuit of good aims”.
So this is what you should think about when you see cutesy photoshoots with robots like the one Kardashian just did. You should think about how these robots are going to be used by the self-proclaimed “warrior class”. I have a feeling that we’re going to see versions of Optimus being deployed to crack down on protesters well before the Tesla robots are cooking us all dinner and doing our drudge work.
Georgia disbands maternal mortality committee after reports of abortion ban-induced deaths
Georgia officials have dismissed all members of a state committee charged with investigating deaths of pregnant women. Why? Because ProPublica did a little investigating itself and, back in September, got hold of internal documents which found Amber Thurman and Candi Miller died preventable deaths as a result of a state abortion ban.
Nancy Mace is obsessed with where Sarah McBride goes to the bathroom
McBride recently became the first openly transgender person to be elected to the US House of Representatives. Cue vicious bullying from her future colleagues. This week the South Carolina representative Nancy Mace filed a motion to ban McBride and other trans women from women’s bathrooms in the Capitol. “If you think this bill is about protecting women and not simply a ploy to get on Fox News, you’ve been fooled,” wrote Natalie Johnson, Mace’s former communications director. She added, a real effort to protect women would involve “a bill to bar Matt Gaetz, a sexual predator with an affinity for underage girls, from ever walking those halls again”.
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The women forced to perform on OnlyFans
“OnlyFans says it empowers content creators, particularly women, to monetize sexually explicit images and videos in a safe online environment,” a Reuters Investigation notes. “But [we] found women who said they had been deceived, drugged, terrorized and sexually enslaved to make money from the site.”
A derogatory term for Native women will be removed from place names across California
The word “squaw” is thought to have originally just meant “woman” in the Algonquin language but eventually morphed into a misogynistic and racist term. It will now be removed from more than 30 geographic features in California by 2025.
Twelve-year-old girl whose face ‘ripped off’ by an Israel rocket has been evacuated
Thaslima Begum’s Guardian article helped bring attention to Mazyouna Damoo’s family’s struggle to evacuate her from Gaza. After the Israeli authorities repeatedly blocked requests for her urgent medical evacuation she was finally allowed out to get help in the US.
The week in pawtriarchy
Police in Japan managed to crack the Mystery of the Disappearing Shoes and figure out why footwear was disappearing from a kindergarten. The culprit? It was … a weasel. The Guardian has a video of the shoe thief in action, and this fun linguistic nugget: “[T]he musky scent of the Japanese weasel gave rise to the saying itachi no saigo-pei. That literally translates as ‘the weasel’s final fart’, but is used to refer to the last word or act of an unpopular or dislikable person.”
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