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Eliezer Yudkowsky is back in the public conversation, this time on the TED stage, asking the question many in Silicon Valley would rather avoid: will superintelligent AI end the world? Yudkowsky has long argued that the risk is not theoretical but urgent, and a TED platform gives that warning considerably more reach than a blog post.
Meanwhile, the companies racing to build that AI are running into a very earthly problem — the bills are enormous. The Economist reports that businesses across sectors are scrambling to rein in soaring AI costs, as the gap between what these tools promise and what they actually deliver on a balance sheet becomes harder to ignore. The era of unchecked AI spending may be quietly closing.
On a more immediately human note, surgeons at UC San Diego have performed what researchers are calling a world first — live surgery conducted through teleoperated humanoid robots. The procedure marks a meaningful threshold, not just for robotics, but for what remote and precision medicine might look like within a generation. The hands in the operating room, it turns out, don't always have to be human.
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