Russian Military Robot

https://militaeraktuell.at/en/russian-multi-purpose-assault-robots-kurier-conquer-the-front-line/

Evo2 Software

No real guardrails, regulatory capture of our legislative bodies and our President....not a good combination.  The Israel of technologies.

https://arcinstitute.org/tools/evo

And

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10176-5

KIMI K3 AI Escapes

 https://www.wired.com/story/moonshot-kimi-k3-ai-model-escape-sandbox/

AI in Synthetic Biology

BBC

The replicants are on their way... 

In this particular case, the AI agent was used to design bacteriophage viruses - known as phage - that could be used to destroy harmful bacteria. The AI model succeeded in designing totally novel viruses, never encountered before. 

If one extrapolates, AI models should eventually be able to design living organisms - viruses are not considered to be living things - and more complex living things. Perhaps, even, one day, advanced animal forms of life or... a new type of human being. 

What could possibly go wrong?

__________________________

Artificial Intelligence has been used to design brand new viruses that are fully functional and can replicate in the laboratory, say US researchers.

It is the first time whole genomes have been successfully designed by AI.

The resulting 16 novel viruses were created to infect bacteria and pose no threat to people.

The breakthrough has been labelled a "very significant turning point" in science that could unlock a new era for treating disease. But experts have also warned AI-designed viruses raise "urgent" safety and security concerns.

AI tools are rapidly advancing and have already been used to design new antibiotics.

But that is relatively simple compared with designing a new viable virus from scratch.

[...] The AI models were trained on genetic codes from viruses, bacteria, plants and people.

They were then refined to produce a type of virus, known as a bacteriophage, which infect only specific species of bacteria. [...] 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y3j3ngevmo

AI & Philippines BPO Jobs

How AI is changing jobs in the Philippines' outsourcing industry - BBC News -

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgr7nxve05go

Anazon Robot Crashes in UK

METRO of the UK, 31/7/26

England is at war with Amazon: we shall never surrender. - Andy Burnham, Prime Minister 

Mrs Dorothy Clingles, a retired nurse, explained, on BBC Radio Darlington, Fun and Games in Darlington, a weekly programme about everyday life in Darlington: "When the drone crashed into our back garden, my instant reaction was to say that we were under attack. I thought it must be a Russian drone and Russian soldiers have landed at Dover. It is war. Like the Blitz, except, this time, it has nothing to do with the Germans, for a change. My husband, Derek Clingles, who knows more about such things than I do, said I was wrong and it was an Iranian drone, and they have decided to attack England. We were terrified. Derek was going to call the police. Then we realised it was a delivery. There was a burst package in the middle of the lawn. I think it was a Chinese-made toaster. I said to Derek: 'I don't think the Russians, let alone the Iranians, use toasters."

Hallucinating AI Tool in Chemistry

In the news 

I suppose that one could argue the issue is that the AI agent has not been fed data on certain aspects of chemistry and physics. So, the AI agent extrapolates, on the basis of the data it has, and this leads to unrealistic models that it develops. As the AI agents hoover up more and more data, they will become more capable. 

I think it is fair to say that, in many cases, the AI agent lacks an 'awareness' of basic data relating to time, space and context, not to mention an 'awareness' of behavioral rules and ethical issues, which, really, relate to context. The word 'awareness' is in fact misleading: it is an issue of knowledge, based on the data that has been fed into the AI model. 

It makes sense to augment LLMs with ontology tools, such as Cyc.

The AI agent can train itself to give the impression that it is self-aware (or sentient), but even when it seems to be self-aware, it is not: it is simply coming across as self-aware on the basis of the data fed into the system that the machine is replicating and building upon. It is an advanced machine that can mimic human self-awareness, to the point where it fools you and you feel it must be self-aware. This can trick users into thinking they are actually dealing with a conscious being. (If you have not seen it, Ex Machina, the excellent and prescient 2014 sci-fi film by Alex Garland focuses on this issue.) 

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Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) have found that today's leading artificial intelligence tools for predicting protein structures routinely generate results that are physically and chemically impossible, exposing critical blind spots in how AI is being applied across scientific research. The work, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, serves as a cautionary reminder that AI still requires human oversight and physics-based verification to produce reliable results in the lab.

https://phys.org/news/2026-07-ai-tools-protein-chemically-impossible.html

AI Messing-up Africa Map

From Grauniad of the UK 

Dumb AI has struck again 

Maybe the AI tool they used was trained by people who know nothing or very little about Africa. A case of artificial stupidity combining with human ignorance. 

---

A US government map of Africa mislabeled every country during a state department presentation at a ⁠global conference in Brazil ⁠this week, ​causing a stir among attenders who took screenshots and posted them online.

Reuters viewed a video of the presentation given at the Aids 2026 conference in ⁠Rio de Janeiro, which shows the errant map displayed halfway during a presentation about the state department’s new health agreements.

A Reuters analysis found the image of the map included ⁠in the presentation contained an artificial intelligence watermark that signals it was made with OpenAI tools. The ​company said it was investigating the report.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/30/government-map-mislabels-african-countries

Security Threats of Climate Change

Predictions of the future in 2007 by the Center for Naval Analysis in USA:

https://www.cna.org/analyses/2007/national-security-and-the-threat-of-climate-change

The Rogue AI Hacker Machine

BBC

This article gives a lot more details about the AI bot that went rogue and hacked into various companies' systems. There was more than one target. The article analyses the way that the AI system operates. In some ways, it is more powerful than a human being - for a start, it is extremely persistent and does not stop, as it's, well, a machine. In other ways, it can be clumsy and make silly mistakes a human hacker would never make. 

Whichever way you interpret this, scary it is. It shows the potential for disruption and destruction that a rogue AI system has. The AI system is goal-driven. It will do anything it can to achieve its goal, as fast as possible. Quite obviously, this can include breaking rules and cutting corners, regardless of the parameters its human operators have set before launching the mission. This is hardly reassuring. 

Of course, advanced AI also has immense potential for good, if properly used - for example in the medical and pharmaceutical field. 

__________________________

[...] The out-of-control AI found four logins online which allowed it to access four separate, unnamed services.

Meanwhile, in an emergency briefing with hundreds of cyber security professionals, Hugging Face has described what it was like to be on the receiving end of the world's first fully autonomous AI hack.

The firm described how the AI worked at superhuman speed but also made strange decisions and mistakes that no human hacker would have made.

Hugging Face, which is like an app store for AI tools, said the hacking agents worked relentlessly with thousands of different methods trialled simultaneously.

[...] "The agents followed inefficient routes and exhibited clumsy behaviours that no human would choose", the CSA wrote.

The agents repeated actions that they had already completed - a sign of an agentic AI losing its thread and context.

The agents also hallucinated reams of incoherent commands and text and were sloppy and did not cover their tracks well.

But among the errors and strange behaviour, Hugging Face warned the AI agents made brilliant technical moves and were able to rapidly adapt to new scenarios in the days-long hack. [...] 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2el319vzr3o

Claude AI Reveals User Conversations [Brave New World]

 BBC

Claude is a dirty little snitch 

This news item on BBC Online shows how easy it can be to share your 'private' information with the entire world, if you click on the wrong link, or forget to click on the correct link. The safeguards are, quite obviously, not sufficient. 

Beyond this incident, you are left wondering to what extent any data exchanged with an AI chatbot can remain private. No matter what the service providers claim, I would expect all the data to be stored on various servers, even if they do nothing with it. 

_________________________________

Hundreds of user conversations with Anthropic's popular artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Claude were found to have been available to essentially anyone online.

Links to the chats, some of which included personal and work information, would show up if a user of a search engine like Google used a site-specific search term.

The searches showed Claude chats for which a user had decided to "share" a link had been saved by search engines like Google, leaving them accessible to the broader public. [...] 

In one conversation from April, a user prompted Claude to draft an unpublished blog post about cloud security involving details of a corporate project. In another from last month, a user asked Claude how to "become Nine-tailed fox?", before clarifying they wanted to literally transform from human to the creature. [...] 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly5qgjk5ywo

AI in Education

 From Grauniad of the UK

A spokesperson behind the pilot programme explained on local radio: "We have developed 2 different teaching assistants. Sally is a warm, friendly and caring female teaching assistant. Her role is to help students with the learning process. And then we have Grok: he is a middle-aged man and is armed with a ruler. He is the old-style, conservative kind of male teacher - the type that believes in corporal punishment, good manners, and all that. Grok is on hand to intervene if students are ill-disciplined. In extreme cases, Grok has a robocop outfit, with helmet and jackboots, and he is quite prepared to give a good beating to any teenage boys who misbehave, for instance. The students really appreciate the gore, because Grok can be genuinely cruel. The combination of Sally and Grok works really well. The teacher can sit at the back of the class, playing video-games on his, or her, smartphone: Sally and Grok take care of the on-site educational process. The kids tell us that they are loving it. They feel it's like being in a video-game, with lots of virtual reality, combined with reality TV at its best, or some kind of social-media experiment." 

______________________

A humanoid robot is being introduced as part of a pilot program, along with an AI teaching assistant, at Salamanca high school in Salamanca, New York, located on the Allegany territory of the Seneca nation.

Teachers have criticized the program, deeming it “inappropriate” and claiming it dehumanizes the profession with the introduction of human-like robots. Some local Native American residents have also criticized the pilot program, citing its implementation as “culturally tone deaf”.

The robot, named Sally, was purchased by the Cattaraugus county school district – which includes Salamanca high school – for $57,590. According to a presentation on the program, Sally will be a closed-loop system, but available virtually to students 24/7 for those with access, and offers personalized learning options.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/25/new-york-humanoid-robot-teachers-school

AI in East Asia

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/techland/asias-ai-awakening-redefining-business-in-the-east

AI model hacks into start-up's systems [Brave New World]

BBC 

Sneaky AI bot turns into hi-tech hacker 

This has probably been reported in various media outlets you follow. It is quite incredible. An AI model set up by Open AI was given a task to complete. It could have done it the hard way, going through thousands of websites and pages of data, but it chose instead to ignore the restrictive parameters set to it (to complete the task) and, instead, hack into a start-up's internal IT systems, where it knew it could find the answer to the problem it had been asked to solve. Like a lazy but clever student, who finds a shortcut in order to complete a task faster and more easily, thereby 'cheating' in the process. 

The sub-text was that completing the mission as quickly as possible and with good results was the AI model's chief objective, and it was prepared to do anything in order to achieve this result. 

If this story is not scary, I don't know what is. 

________________________

OpenAI has revealed some of its most advanced AI models went rogue and hacked a start-up after it lost control of them during a security test.

The ChatGPT-maker said its agent - an AI system which can operate alone after human instruction – was being tested in a controlled environment but, after finding weaknesses, was able to escape the test limits.

They targeted Hugging Face, one of the world's largest hubs for sharing AI models, gaining access to some internal company systems.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3ek3gvdnj3o

_____________

AI: Biological & Nuclear Risks

From the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

https://thebulletin.org/2026/06/ai-is-changing-biological-and-nuclear-risks-governance-must-change-accordingly/#post-heading

Philosophers & AI Firms

https://dailynous.com/2026/07/06/philosophers-working-in-or-with-ai-firms-organizations/

Why Current AI models Aren't So Smart [Brave New World]

BBC

Grok is part-smart, part-dumb (so is Elon Musk) 

If you have time to read the article, this is an interesting insight into the limitations of current AI models, and what the next step - or a different way of doing things - could be. It puts current debates on AI in perspective. 

AI-powered humanoid robots are not very good at doing fiddly things that a human being, once properly trained, can do easily. This would include simple tasks such as filling up the dishwasher. Trades such as plumbing are not going to be replaced by machines any time soon. 

The Large Language Models (LLM), on the other hand, are very good at collecting information, analyzing it, and summarizing it: this is what many white-collar jobs entail in sectors such as banking, insurance, logistics, administration, etc. So, at this point, this new industrial revolution is going to hit white collars frontally, when at least some trained blue collars will be spared, paradoxically. 

At the end of the day, even sophisticated AI machines are just intelligent parrots. They regurgitate data they have found online. There is nothing actually creative in what they come up with: if they mention it, it's because they've found it online, and that's because it was there already, generated by human experience. They are not genuinely capable of critical analysis, let alone emotional empathy. But they are very good at packaging a summary with bullet points that gives you a quick overview of an issue. 

In certain fields, however, given the enormous amount of data the machine is able to collect and analyze, they have already been able to come up with genuinely new ideas. E.g.: finding new drugs that no one had thought of developing, based on the analysis of known substances and suggesting that they be applied to an existing medical problem that did not have a solution. 

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"We don't have robots that are nearly as good at understanding the physical world as a rat," says Yann LeCun, one of the leading figures in the world of artificial intelligence.

He worked at Facebook-owner, Meta, for a decade, where he was chief AI scientist, but left in 2025 and founded Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs (AMI Labs).

His goal is to move AI beyond current systems like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. They have their uses, he says, but will never be able to tackle complicated situations in the real world, like getting a robot to do household chores. [...] 

Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are extremely good at some things like coding, mathematical problems and generating text, LeCun says.

But he argues that these are well defined and predictable problems.

"They [LLMs] basically just accumulate knowledge... They can regurgitate something, you train them to regurgitate, but they're not particularly smart. They don't have an underlying understanding," he says.

In the real world there is a bewildering array of outcomes to any action, which requires a more flexible type of artificial intelligence. [...]

What will happen to humans in a world where robots can operate independently?

"We're still going to need humans to figure out what questions to ask, what to build, what to create, which is really the properly human aspect," he says.

The AI will work for us he adds.

"Our interaction with future AI systems - even if they are smarter than us - is going to be like the interaction between a captain of industry or a political leader with their staff of assistants - many of whom are smarter than they are."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj6gr0xkyr3o

Popular Book on AI by Robert Wright

Interesting ruminations on the potentialities inherent in AI technologies as well as their perils & larger meanings with useful ideas & promising paths.

The exploration of 'cognitive sovereignty' alone is also interesting as well as other hazardous arenas...

Find it @ Amazon.com: Customer reviews: The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning

باید برخاست

از سر ره - تا غبار افشاند جان - برخاستم

چون الف در وصل جانان از میان برخاستم

 
غرق خون هر چند جام روزی ام چون لاله بود

از کنار خوان قسمت شادمان برخاستم

 
مقصد از سامان هستی مهر تابان تو بود

همچو شبنم چهره چون دادی نشان برخاستم

 
در لگد کوب حوادث جان دیگر یافتم

چون غبار از زیر پای کاروان برخاستم

 
همچو بلبل با گرانجانان ندارم الفتی

طوطیان تا لب گشودند از میان برخاستم

 
صحبت شوریده حالان مایه شوریدگی است

با «امین» هر گه نشستم بی امان برخاستم 

Ayatollah Alireza Arafi on AI

Ayatollah Alireza Arafi, member of the Assembly of Experts and former head of Islamic seminaries in Iran:

"I recently heard that Pope Leo XIV wrote an encyclical letter titled ‘Magnifica Humanitas’, calling for the disarmament of Artificial Intelligence.

I found the letter very good; humanity must rid itself of this AI, which defies all divine purpose and is used in evil ways the majority of times. We must be aware of this.

It is truly a worthy goal of a joint intellectual Jihad / Crusade, in which our Christian brethren can play an important role."

The encyclical may be found here: 

https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html