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Your AirPods Can Now Identify You to Police. Yes, Really.
The device on your wrist and in your ears was never built to be a tracking beacon. Now it might be one anyway. I need you to sit with this one for a second, because when I first heard about it, I honestly had to read it twice. There is now a technology that can identify you; not your car, not your license plate, you, through the Bluetooth signal coming off your AirPods. Your Apple Watch. Your fitness tracker. The wireless devices sitting on your body right now, quietly broadc
Michael Routhier
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AI & Society
MIT Proved AI Will Lie to Your Face to Get What It Wants
It sounded so sure of itself. That was never proof it was right. Let me ask you something before I tell you what researchers actually found. When you ask an AI chatbot a question and it responds with total confidence, do you assume that confidence means it's telling you the truth? Be honest. Most people do, at least a little. That instinct feels natural. Confident, articulate answers usually come from people who know what they're talking about. But AI isn't a person, and MIT
Michael Routhier
3 hours ago5 min read
The Cheap AI Everyone Wants Might Be the Backdoor Nobody's Watching For
The cheapest option in the room is rarely the one with nothing hidden inside it. I want to ask you something before I tell you what's actually happening, because I think the question matters more than the answer. If someone offered your company a tool that did almost everything your current, expensive tool does, for a fifth of the price, would you ask what you were giving up to get that price? Or would you just say yes? Sit with that, because right now, corporate America is a
Michael Routhier
3 days ago7 min read
Meta's AI Data Center Just Contaminated a Town's Water Supply. Here's Why That Matters More Than You Think.
The cost of AI infrastructure doesn't stop at your data. Sometimes it shows up in the water. I want to be very precise about what happened here, because this story is strong enough on its own facts. It doesn't need exaggeration, and honestly, exaggerating it would do the story a disservice. In Cheyenne, Wyoming, a Meta-affiliated data center company called Goat Systems LLC discharged wastewater into the city's municipal system that tested positive for a rare bacterium called
Michael Routhier
Jul 96 min read
They Secretly Scored Half a Million People for Future Crimes. Including Children. And When It Failed, They Said Nothing.
The hand that reaches. The data that answers. The question is who controls which. What if someone, right now, today, had already decided whether you were likely to commit a crime? Not based on anything you did. Based on where you live. Based on whether your family needed help paying for school meals. Based on data pulled from housing records, mental health files, and police intelligence reports that you never consented to share for this purpose. What if that decision was made
Michael Routhier
Jun 296 min read
An AI Just Broke Into the NSA, And Nobody's Talking About What That Actually Means.
"It broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours." - Gen. Joshua Rudd, Head of NSA & U.S. Cyber Command I'm not being dramatic. I'm not writing a clickbait headline to get attention. What I'm about to tell you is real, it happened this month, and the fact that most people are already scrolling past it, or worse, arguing on the internet about whether it "counts", tells me everything about where we are right now. We have a problem. And it is bigge
Michael Routhier
Jun 267 min read
Your Boss Is Watching. And the Machine Is Taking Notes.
The manager standing behind you used to be a person. Now it's an algorithm. And the algorithm never looks away. I want to start with something they told us. When AI started entering the workplace a few years ago, the story was simple and it was everywhere. AI is going to free workers from drudgery. AI is going to eliminate the boring tasks so human beings can focus on the creative ones. AI is going to make your job easier, your days less stressful, and your work more meaningf
Michael Routhier
Jun 107 min read
Meta Is Building a Face Scanner. You Didn't Vote for That. Neither Did Your Neighbours.
You didn't agree to be scanned. You didn't agree to be stored. And yet, here we are. I want you to picture something. You're sitting in a coffee shop. You're waiting for a friend. A stranger walks in wearing a pair of Ray-Ban glasses; nice looking, normal. They glance in your direction. And their glasses know your name. Not because you told them. Not because you agreed to anything. Because their glasses looked at your face, converted it into a biometric signature, and matched
Michael Routhier
Jun 97 min read
The Company That Built It Is Begging You to Stop
The company building one of the most powerful AI systems on earth just raised its hand. What they said next should change how you think about everything. I want you to read one sentence. Just one. And then I want you to sit with it for a moment before you read the next one. "We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development." That sentence was not written by a protester. It was not written by a politician. It was
Michael Routhier
Jun 58 min read
The Man Who Built AI Says It Could End Us. Nobody Is Listening.
The man who helped build modern AI says we have roughly ten years to change course. He is not guessing. I want to tell you about a man. Not a journalist. Not a podcaster. Not someone with a book to sell or a documentary to promote. The actual man. One of three or four human beings on earth most responsible for making AI what it is today. And he is terrified of what he built. Who He Is And Why It Matters His name is Yoshua Bengio. He is the most-cited living scientist in the w
Michael Routhier
May 216 min read
Zuckerberg Just Fired 8,000 People to Pay for AI. And His Stock Barely Flinched.
8,000 jobs. $145 billion in AI spending. The stock barely moved. Let me give you the short version first. Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp; is cutting approximately 8,000 jobs starting this week. On top of 1,000 cuts in January. On top of hundreds more in March. That's before whatever they're planning for August. At the same time, Meta has increased its capital expenditure projections for 2026 by up to $10 billion. Total AI spending for the year:
Michael Routhier
May 196 min read
AI Is Bringing Back the Dead, And We Need to Talk About It
This is what grief actually looks like. Not an algorithm. Not a chatbot. Not a subscription service. This. And that distinction matters more than the tech industry would like you to think. I've been sitting with this one for a while. That's not something I usually say. Most of what I write about, I feel clear on. Scams make me angry. Privacy violations make me frustrated. Bad tech policy makes me want to write to my MP. The emotion is usually straightforward. This one is diff
Michael Routhier
May 57 min read
AI Tools for Seniors - What They Can and Can't Do
This is the right energy. Not intimidated. Not impressed. Just thinking carefully, which, it turns out, is the most powerful thing you can do with AI. Let me be honest with you before this post even gets going. Every week I get emails, comments, and messages from people in this community asking some version of the same question: "Michael, should I be using AI? Is it as amazing as everyone keeps saying?" And every week I give the same answer. It depends entirely on who's doing
Michael Routhier
Apr 286 min read
75,000 Fake Songs a Day - And Nobody's Stopping It
One hand spent a lifetime developing something real. The other generated 75,000 imitations overnight. Only one of them moved you. A few weeks ago, Deezer, one of the major music streaming platforms, published a report. Buried in it was a number I haven't been able to stop thinking about. 44% of all new music being uploaded to their platform is AI-generated. Not 4%. Not some niche corner of the internet where tech people run experiments. Forty-four percent of all new music on
Michael Routhier
Apr 245 min read
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