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." 

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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. 

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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

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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

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