In 2024 alone, authorities imposed 304 internet shutdowns across 54 countries - the highest number ever recorded. This reflects a growing trend of governments treating connectivity as a weapon.
"That requires a bunch of people to go take things that folks here are figuring out and [explain them] to the rest of the world," said Jeffrey Ladish, emphasizing the need for effective communication about AI risks.
Analilia Mejia's win with a nearly 20-point margin over Hathaway is significant, indicating strong voter support for Democrats in the current political climate.
A group of researchers from Berkeley, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, and Yale warn that the rise of AI bots and AI agents could pose a serious threat to democracy. For example, power-hungry politicians around the world can relatively easily create swarms of AI bots that flood social media and messaging services with propaganda and disinformation. In this way, they can not only influence election results but also persuade parts of the population to replace parliamentary democracy with an authoritarian regime.
Messages intended to suppress votes can be precisely delivered to particularly vulnerable and consequential groups of people via social media and keep millions of them from casting ballots, according to a new study that is the first to quantify the effect of this kind of microtargeting on voter turnout. A team led by a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison recruited more than 10,000 people across the United States-a group representative of the country's voting population-to install an app that