An artificial intelligence researcher who quit AI firm Anthropic has said people working on the technology were "genuinely frightened" about the speed of its advancements and what it could mean for humanity. The 27-year-old's former boss, Anthropic head Dario Amodei, recently called for AI development to slow down – though some have questioned the motivations behind this.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1kx0gyje9wo
Bastille Networks, a startup specializing in wireless intrusion detection, announced Thursday what it called “first-of-its-kind software” to spot smart glasses at customer sites. The San Diego-based firm pitches this new solution, available to companies that already subscribe to its monitoring services, as going well beyond indie apps like Nearby Glasses and the cleverly named Zuckoff that scan for Bluetooth Low Energy signals from smart glasses
https://www.pcmag.com/news/worried-about-snooping-smart-glasses-this-startups-tech-detects-nearby
The big phone news, though, was about a device that is kind of not a phone: the iPhone Duo, a $2,000 foldable device that Apple describes as like a “passport.” When closed, it looks like a slightly widened 5.4-inch iPhone; when opened, it expands into a 7.6-inch miniature tablet. Like numerous Android folding devices before it, it relies on a mechanical hinge and a flexible display with a seam (ideally, not prone to failure) in the middle.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/new-at-apple-pricey-iphones-and-a-watch-that-eavesdrops.html
It’s finally happening — this week, we are (probably) about to see Apple’s first foldable iPhone, more than five years after Samsung launched its first foldable phone. While the foldable iPhone is most exciting, we’re also anticipating news about AirPods, HomePods, and the non-foldable iPhone 18 line.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/07/what-we-expect-from-the-upcoming-apple-launch/
LG smart TVs are almost constantly logging and uploading data about owners and their homes, even when offline or on standby mode, according to a new report from YouTube channel Gamers Nexus. The company’s TV sets scan Wi-Fi networks for nearby devices, record audio logs through their microphones, and use audio and video sampling to recognize exactly what you’re watching from across the TV inputs.
https://www.theverge.com/tech/991190/lg-tv-spying-standby-recording-wi-fi-scanning-gamers-nexus
Generative AI menus have hit the restaurant business courtesy of models trained on a narrow, “pleasing” aesthetic that feels wrong even when you can’t articulate why. “The optimization of the datasets is for pleasingness, or you know, not being offensive, and so there’s a way that turns into homogenization,” Lee Rainie, director of the Imagining the Digital Future Center at Elon University, told TechCrunch. “What AI is known to do both in images and language is to shave off the edges.”
https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/03/the-sameness-problem-behind-those-unappetizing-ai-generated-menus
Yesterday a16z published an article in which NYU Professor of Design, AI and Media Theory Ruby Thelot argued that “enshittification,” or the concept that technology platforms get worse after they lock in users, isn’t real. In reality, Thelot says, people use social media more than ever and report that they are satisfied with it.
https://www.404media.co/a16z-says-you-actually-love-social-media-enshittification-isnt-real/