doomerism

In 2024 alone, 350 known drone incursions were reported over a hundred different US military installations. A lack of coordination or even clarity from the White House, Pentagon or US intelligence community has led some in domestic law enforcement to turn to an unlikely source for help cracking the case of these mystery drones: two UFO hunters out on Long Island in New York called John and Gerald Tedesco.

The twin brothers each spent about three decades in the private sector working in electrical engineering and instrumentation design before they decided to kit out an old RV with an array of homemade signals collection equipment.

What the Tedescos appear to have done, in their effort to bring a maximalist approach to the sensors directed at these suspected alien spacecraft, is independently engineer the kind of aerial surveillance capability rarely seen outside the classified world. Read the full story.

—Matthew Phelan

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Open the pod bay doors, Claude

The trope of AI going rogue, disobeying commands and threatening its human operators is well-worn in Sci-Fi. But it’s no longer just the stuff of fiction. AI doomerism, the idea that this technology—specifically its hypothetical upgrades, artificial general intelligence and super-intelligence—will crash civilizations, even kill us all, is now riding another wave.

The weird thing is that such fears are now driving much-needed action to regulate AI—even if the justification for that action is a bit bonkers. Read the full story.

—Will Douglas Heaven

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.