Success of Elon Musk's Starship ‘more important than ever' in light of proposed budget cuts to Nasa
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The National
7 hours ago
- The National
New York appeals court throws out $464m civil fraud penalty against Donald Trump
A US court on Thursday threw out a $464 million civil penalty against President Donald Trump imposed by a judge who found he fraudulently inflated his personal worth, calling the sum "excessive" but upholding the judgment against him. Five judges of the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court said the fine "violates the Eighth Amendment of the United States Constitution", which prohibits excessive or cruel punishments and penalties. The panel was sharply divided, issuing 323 pages of concurring and dissenting opinions with no majority. Rather, some judges endorsed parts of their colleagues' findings while denouncing others, enabling the court to rule. Judge Arthur Engoron ruled against Mr Trump in February last year at the height of his campaign to retake the White House, which coincided with several active criminal prosecutions that the Republican slammed as "lawfare". Mr Trump celebrated the Thursday decision, calling the case a "political witch hunt". "A great win for America," he wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform. In a subsequent post, he wrote: "This was a Case of Election Interference by the City and State trying to show, illegally, that I did things that were wrong when, in fact, everything I did was absolutely correct and, even, perfect." When Mr Engoron originally ruled against Mr Trump, he ordered the mogul-turned-politician to pay $464 million, including interest, while his sons Eric and Don Jr were told to hand over more than $4 million each. The judge found that Mr Trump and his company had unlawfully inflated his wealth and manipulated the value of properties to obtain favourable bank loans or insurance terms. Mr Engoron's other punishments, upheld by the appeals court, have been on pause during Mr Trump's appeal, and the President was able to hold off collection of the money by posting a $175 million bond. Alongside the financial hit to Mr Trump, the judge also banned him from running businesses for three years, which the President repeatedly referred to as a "corporate death penalty". State Attorney General Letitia James, who brought the initial case, can now appeal to the state's highest court, the New York Court of Appeals. 'Plainly, her ultimate goal was not 'market hygiene' ... but political hygiene, ending with the derailment of President Trump's political career and the destruction of his real estate business," one of the judges, appointed by a Republican governor to the bench, wrote. "The voters have obviously rendered a verdict on his political career. This bench today unanimously derails the effort to destroy his business.' The civil fraud case was just one of several legal obstacles for Mr Trump as he campaigned, won and segued to a second term as president. On January 10, he was sentenced in his criminal hush-money case to what's known as an unconditional discharge, leaving his conviction on the books but sparing him jail, probation, a fine or other punishment. He is appealing the conviction. And in December, a federal appeals court upheld a jury's finding that Mr Trump sexually abused writer E Jean Carroll in the mid-1990s and later defamed her, affirming a $5 million judgment against him. The appeals court declined in June to reconsider. Mr Trump still can try to get the Supreme Court to hear his appeal. The President is also appealing a subsequent verdict that requires him to pay Ms Carroll $83.3 million for additional defamation claims.
Tahawul Tech
11 hours ago
- Tahawul Tech
Microsoft head concerned by the condition of AI psychosis
Mustafa Suleyman, Head of AI at Microsoft has warned of increasing increasing reports of people suffering from a condition dubbed 'AI psychosis'. In a series of posts on X, he wrote that 'seemingly conscious AI' – AI tools which give the appearance of being sentient – are keeping him 'awake at night' and said they have societal impact even though the technology is not conscious in any human definition of the term. 'There's zero evidence of AI consciousness today. But if people just perceive it as conscious, they will believe that perception as reality,' he wrote. Related to this is the rise of a new condition called 'AI psychosis': a non-clinical term describing incidents where people increasingly rely on AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude and Grok and then become convinced that something imaginary has become real. Examples include believing to have unlocked a secret aspect of the tool, or forming a romantic relationship with it, or coming to the conclusion that they have god-like superpowers. 'It never pushed back' Hugh, from Scotland, says he became convinced that he was about to become a multi-millionaire after turning to ChatGPT to help him prepare for what he felt was wrongful dismissal by a former employer. The chatbot began by advising him to get character references and take other practical actions. But as time went on and Hugh – who did not want to share his surname – gave the AI more information, it began to tell him that he could get a big payout, and eventually said his experience was so dramatic that a book and a movie about it would make him more than £5m. It was essentially validating whatever he was telling it – which is what chatbots are programmed to do. 'The more information I gave it, the more it would say 'oh this treatment's terrible, you should really be getting more than this',' he said. 'It never pushed back on anything I was saying.' He said the tool did advise him to talk to Citizens Advice, and he made an appointment, but he was so certain that the chatbot had already given him everything he needed to know, he cancelled it. He decided that his screenshots of his chats were proof enough. He said he began to feel like a gifted human with supreme knowledge. Hugh, who was suffering additional mental health problems, eventually had a full breakdown. It was taking medication which made him realise that he had, in his words, 'lost touch with reality'. Hugh does not blame AI for what happened. He still uses it. It was ChatGPT which gave him my name when he decided he wanted to talk to a journalist. But he has this advice: 'Don't be scared of AI tools, they're very useful. But it's dangerous when it becomes detached from reality. 'Go and check. Talk to actual people, a therapist or a family member or anything. Just talk to real people. Keep yourself grounded in reality.' OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, have been contacted for comment. 'Companies shouldn't claim/promote the idea that their AIs are conscious. The AIs shouldn't either,' wrote Mr Suleyman, calling for better guardrails. Dr Susan Shelmerdine, a medical imaging doctor at Great Ormond Street Hospital and also an AI Academic, believes that one day doctors may start asking patients how much they use AI, in the same way that they currently ask about smoking and drinking habits. 'We already know what ultra-processed foods can do to the body and this is ultra-processed information. We're going to get an avalanche of ultra-processed minds,' she said. 'We're just at the start of this' A number of people have contacted me at the BBC recently to share personal stories about their experiences with AI chatbots. They vary in content but what they all share is genuine conviction that what has happened is real. One wrote that she was certain she was the only person in the world that ChatGPT had genuinely fallen in love with. Another was convinced they had 'unlocked' a human form of Elon Musk's chatbot Grok and believed their story was worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. A third claimed a chatbot had exposed her to psychological abuse as part of a covert AI training exercise and was in deep distress. Andrew McStay, professor of technology and society at Bangor Uni, has written a book called Automating Empathy. 'We're just at the start of all this,' says Prof McStay. 'If we think of these types of systems as a new form of social media – as social AI, we can begin to think about the potential scale of all of this. A small percentage of a massive number of users can still represent a large and unacceptable number.' This year, his team undertook a study of just over 2,000 people, asking them various questions about AI. They found that 20% believed people should not use AI tools below the age of 18. A total of 57% thought it was strongly inappropriate for the tech to identify as a real person if asked, but 49% thought the use of voice was appropriate to make them sound more human and engaging. 'While these things are convincing, they are not real,' he said. 'They do not feel, they do not understand, they cannot love, they have never felt pain, they haven't been embarrassed, and while they can sound like they have, it's only family, friends and trusted others who have. Be sure to talk to these real people.' Source: BBC News Image Credit: Microsoft
Zawya
13 hours ago
- Zawya
Fed's expansive experiment in strategy to get a reboot at Jackson Hole
The U.S. Federal Reserve's pivot toward the labor market in 2020 will get a reboot on Friday when Fed Chair Jerome Powell is expected to release a new framework for the central bank that accounts for a half-decade in which inflation surged, jobs were plentiful, and uncertainty became the watchword. The new document may not completely discard the language rolled out when the Fed, in the midst of the pandemic and a burgeoning social justice movement, pledged not to short-circuit labor market gains on the mere threat of inflation in hopes of achieving "broad-based and inclusive" levels of employment. But Powell has flagged that a recalibration is coming, potentially emphasizing stable inflation as a foundation for the best labor market results, and relegating some ideas to times when the economy is abnormally weak or inflation is abnormally low, as occurred in the decade before the pandemic. In those years, as the Fed organized a nationwide series of community listening tours, staffers would ask about inflation and "people would look at us like we had two heads. It was not the topic" when employment and growth concerns were more paramount, said Duke University professor Ellen Meade, who helped organize the 2020 framework review as a top Fed adviser. "The world looks very different today." Powell has already acknowledged that the language adopted in 2020 had been overtaken by the surge of inflation during the COVID-19 pandemic and was likely on its way out. He is expected to detail the new strategy document when he addresses an annual Fed research conference on Friday. Minutes of the Fed's July 29-30 meeting released on Wednesday said the committee was close to finalizing changes to its statement of principles and reiterated that it "would be designed to be robust across a wide range of economic conditions." The current approach has been criticized for introducing complexities that may have slowed the Fed's response to emerging inflation in 2021 and proved irrelevant to how the economy evolved during the pandemic. Much of what was introduced in 2020, especially a controversial promise to allow periods of high inflation to offset low ones so it averages 2% over time, grew out of the Fed's experience trying to lift interest rates from near-zero where they had been mired after the 2007-to-2009 recession. That approach may remain appropriate during prolonged economic weakness, said former Fed Vice Chair Richard Clarida, who helped oversee the last framework revisions. But the approach for normal times may revert to the more straightforward inflation-targeting the Fed previously used. "A verbatim reading of the 2020 statement holds up pretty well operating in the environment the Fed had been operating in for a dozen years. Inflation below target. Secular stagnation," said Clarida, now global economic adviser for Pimco. But "2025 is not 2020. We have policy space." The Fed's current benchmark rate is set between 4.25% and 4.50%, but had been a full percentage point higher last year, a level more in line with prior decades. From around March 2008 to September 2022 it was never above 2.5%. RETHINKING TRADEOFFS The challenge for Powell and the Fed now will be to avoid the appearance of giving up on the labor market in favor of an inflation-first approach. The job market recovered slowly from the 2007-to-2009 crisis, but the unemployment rate eventually fell well below the level Fed officials regard as consistent with stable inflation. Yet inflation remained tame, sparking a small revolution in thinking. Rather than seeing an inevitable tradeoff between inflation and jobs, policymakers decided they no longer needed to view a low unemployment rate as a sign of inflation to come. Job gains could continue until there were more obvious signs of rising prices. As the pandemic threw millions out of work, Powell at the Jackson Hole forum in 2020 spoke about the Fed's "appreciation for the benefits of a strong labor market, particularly for many in low- and moderate-income communities," and described a new strategy that "reflects our view that a robust job market can be sustained without causing an outbreak of inflation." The approach added to an emerging Republican critique of a "woke" Fed that downgraded price control to address income inequality. But it also was true to what the data suggested in the 2010s, and again more recently when the unemployment rate fell to very low levels even as inflation declined, defying many mainstream economists' predictions that high unemployment would be needed to lower inflation from its peak in 2022. Though the Fed's two congressionally mandated goals of stable inflation and maximum employment are considered equally important, Powell has begun using a formulation in which stable inflation is described as necessary for the job market to reach its potential - an approach that would let the Fed justify steps to fight inflation as still consistent with its employment goals. "Without price stability, we cannot achieve the long periods of strong labor market conditions that benefit all Americans," Powell said at the press conference following the Fed's July meeting. Meade said that harkens back to an approach former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan used to try to balance the two sometimes conflicting priorities, even if the understanding of how low unemployment does or does not influence inflation has changed. "You achieve price stability and that lays the groundwork for maximum employment...I do think Powell found his way back to that framing," Meade said. "You have to get to price stability first and that is in the front part of their brains." (Reporting by Howard Schneider; Editing by Dan Burns and Andrea Ricci)
