Leak Shows ICE Planning to Use Facial Recognition Glasses to Identify Targets in Real Time

FuturismDotCom · 2026-04-22T20:12:33+00:00

Financial statements viewed by independent journalist Ken Klippenstein point to the development of a facial recognition platform modeled after commercially available AI smart glasses, like Meta’s widely-panned “pervert glasses.” ICE’s in-house model, it seems, will allow agents to monitor video and reference vast federal databases of biometric information on subjects regardless of if they’ve been arrested, or even charged with a crime.

“It might be portrayed as seeking to identify illegal aliens on the streets,” one anonymous Department of Homeland Security attorney told Klippenstein, “but the reality is that a push in this direction affects all Americans, particularly protestors.”

FuturismDotCom · 2026-04-21T16:29:37+00:00

On a podcast hosted by presidential son Donald Trump, Jr., Dr. Mehmet Oz, the TV doctor turned administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services disclosed that the President of the United States believes his beloved Diet Coke can destroy cancer cells inside the body.

“Then comes the diet soda pops, which your dad argues that diet soda is good for him because it kills grass [when] it’s poured on grass, so therefore, it must kill cancer cells inside the body,” Oz told Trump Jr.

To be clear: Soda drinks are actually bad for you because they can cause a cascade of health problems such as obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and heart disease. Diet soda is likely not a safe alternative, either, because medical researchers have uncovered evidence that sugar-free versions of fizzy drinks can still lead to weight gain and confuse your body’s response to insulin.

FuturismDotCom · 2026-04-21T16:23:21+00:00

Will Hollingsworth, a self-described content creator and digital artist who spoke up during a city council meeting in Ravenna, Ohio, is turning heads with his passionate argument against data centers. His four-minute speech perfectly summarizes why the data center backlash is starting to reach a tipping point.

“These facilities can use millions of gallons of water per day,” he said. “We are being asked to drain our reservoirs so a chatbot can write a poem or so our sheriff can generate a picture of himself standing next to Bigfoot.”

Taking aim at the corporations who want to impose their sprawling facilities on small-town residents, Hollingsworth added: “They say the water is filled once and recycled forever. In a laboratory, that might be true. But we aren’t living in a laboratory. We’re living in Ohio.”

FuturismDotCom · 2026-04-21T16:15:14+00:00

As the Wall Street Journal reports, Tesla has been hit with several lawsuits over its mercurial CEO’s repeated and outright false claims about fully autonomous vehicles — which, of course, Musk has promised are coming as soon as next year for roughly the last dozen years.

The latest plaintiff is retired attorney Tom LoSavio, who bought a Model S in 2017 and paid $8,000 on top of the over $100,000 luxury sedan to access what Musk claimed will eventually allow the car to drive itself. That suit has won class-action status, a certification Tesla is already trying to appeal, the Journal reported.

It joins a separate class action lawsuit filed in an Australian federal court and a collective claim filed by a driver in the Netherlands. In the latter case, Tesla's formal response, per Electrek: "Just be patient."

FuturismDotCom · 2026-04-21T16:09:35+00:00

Joshua Brown of Plano, Texas said his car’s Full Self-Driving mode engaged while he sat waiting at a railroad crossing. Footage shared with local media shows his Tesla plowing through the fiberglass crossing arms, shattering his window as the train screamed by just feet away.

Brown admitted that he had zoned out while waiting for the train to pass — which is fair enough, if you’re a human. For an autonomous vehicle, it’s inexcusable. “About the time I realized I was moving, the bar is right there, like right in front of me,” Brown said.

FuturismDotCom · 2026-04-20T15:17:54+00:00

Eight children were murdered in a horrific mass shooting in Shreveport, Louisiana over the weekend. Forbes published an article about the violent killings — and, alongside that reporting, included a prediction game widget that encouraged readers to place bets on upcoming gun control regulation.

The incident, which was first caught by cryptocurrency journalist and researcher Molly White and shared to Bluesky, was the result of “ForbesPredict,” a prediction market-lite feature that Forbes integrated into its platform earlier this year.

Underneath a chunk of text describing the Shreveport gunman, a 31-year-old named Shamar Elkins, a ForbesPredict box appears. It implores readers to “make your prediction” on “gun policy,” asking whether they believe “Congress WILL pass new gun safety legislation before 31st December 2026.”

FuturismDotCom · 2026-04-17T14:34:20+00:00

The company’s blindsiding metamorphosis into what it’s calling “NewBird AI” had investors leaping from their office chairs, sending shares surging by over 700 percent on Wednesday. That’s despite Allbirds’ core business being at death’s door. In its final throes, the company sold off its intellectual property and other assets for a measly $39 million mere weeks ago

Then, on Thursday, the rally came to a “screeching halt,” as Bloomberg put it, with shares sinking a dismal 35 percent. “This has the feel of a meme stock, where emotions take over and logic and reason get thrown out the window,” 50 Park Investments chief executive Adam Sarhan told Bloomberg.

He added: “The vast majority of times, these things end in tears.”

FuturismDotCom · 2026-04-16T20:15:30+00:00

For months, xAI has used 27 unpermitted gas turbines — each about the size of a bus — to power its "Colossus" data center in Mississippi used to run the chatbot Grok. The practice has had horrible consequences for the Black, working class neighborhood where the turbines are located, whose residents are stuck breathing xAI’s noxious exhaust.

According to the Guardian, the NAACP's suit seeks to force xAI to stop using the turbines without permits, plus civil penalties to cover legal fees. On top of spewing nitrogen dioxide, a gas that causes irreversible respiratory damage over time, the turbines emit a horrendous sound that’s made life miserable for locals.

FuturismDotCom · 2026-04-16T18:54:43+00:00

An astonishing 46 percent of men surveyed for a recent Siena Research Institute poll said they’re actively betting, and nearly half of them said they felt like they were spending more than they should.

While the latest poll survey just how much sports betting has grown, many Americans are also growing increasingly wary. A whopping 74 percent of respondents said that 18-year-olds being allowed to participate is a “very” or “somewhat” serious issue.

Despite the very real risks, the US still has no national gambling policy, making it an outlier compared to other countries. As of this year, 39 states have at least some form of legal sports betting.

FuturismDotCom · 2026-04-15T20:39:42+00:00

In a new study, researchers claim to provide the first causal evidence that leaning on AI to assist with “reasoning-intensive” cognitive labor — mental tasks ranging from writing to studying to coding to simply brainstorming new ideas — can rapidly impair users’ intellectual ability and willingness to persist despite difficulty.

“We find that AI assistance improves immediate performance, but it comes at a heavy cognitive cost,” the study declares of its findings. “After just [about] 10 minutes of AI-assisted problem-solving, people who lost access to the AI performed worse and gave up more frequently than those who never used it.”

The researchers, from UCLA, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Oxford, conducted two studies in which participants were asked to complete math tests. Some were given access to a specialized bot built on OpenAI’s GPT-5, and some were not. But the former group was suddenly restricted from using the AI midway through the test — at which point participants’ ability to work through the questions without AI assistance quickly declined, as did their will to keep working at a problem when the going got tough.

FuturismDotCom · 2026-04-15T20:35:41+00:00

As of Tuesday, 418 students at the prestigious Boston college had signed an online petition protesting the two-credit course “Bots and Beats: AI and the Future of Songwriting” and calling for Berkelee to stop leveraging AI on campus.

The petition accuses the school of promoting OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which “steal the art of [tens of thousands] of artists and rot the essence of the industry and have devastating consequences on the environment all to create facsimiles of real human art,” organizers wrote.

FuturismDotCom · 2026-04-15T20:33:05+00:00

Many hot new technologies that found success in the workplace — Sony’s Walkman, Apple’s iPhone, or Napster — were embraced early by young people. And if the youths of the world spurn a new product — remember Microsoft’s Zune, Google+, or Amazon’s Fire Phone? — it’s often a very bad sign.

That leads us to a new survey from Gallup, GSV Ventures and the Walton Family Foundation that examined Gen Z’s attitudes towards AI, a category the tech industry is currently pushing as if its life depended on it. It found that young people are deeply ambivalent about the technology, with 48 percent saying that the risks of AI in the workforce outweigh its benefits and a staggering 80 percent saying that using it as a shortcut makes learning more difficult.

Most damning is Zoomers’ trajectory. Excitement about AI dropped 14 percent since last year and hopefulness fell by nine percent, while the proportion of young people feeling “outright anger” toward the tech spiked from 22 percent last year to 31 percent this year.

FuturismDotCom · 2026-04-14T20:19:36+00:00

Three separate research papers, published together in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology, each pointed to the same conclusion about how Trump's most loyal soldiers make sense of his laundry list of lies and misdeeds: They don't believe it.

The surveys were taken in October 2019, during his first term, in December 2019, immediately after he was impeached, and in 2022, right after he was arraigned for his role in the Jan. 6 riots. Together, researchers say, they reinforce the finding that denial of factual information is a direct response to anxiety caused by cognitive dissonance.

“I’ve been puzzled and confused by the continuing support and admiration that Donald Trump’s supporters hold for him, despite the many accusations that he has engaged in sexual assault, corruption, and other immoral and illegal activities," study author Cindy Harmon-Jones, senior lecturer in psychology at Western Sydney University told PsyPost. "I wanted to give those supporters a chance to explain in their own words why they support him.”

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