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Category: policy

The Robot Revolution Is Closer Than You Think

A robot revolution, driven by advancements in robotics and AI, is imminent and will drastically transform the economy, labor, and society, leading to a post-labor, post-scarcity system with abundant energy and labor ##

## Questions to inspire discussion.

Investment & National Strategy.

🚀 Q: Why should governments prioritize humanoid robot investment now? A: Governments must treat humanoid robots as a national priority for transforming productivity and defense, with enormous investments justified because there’s no time to lose as both the US and China have already recognized this imperative.

💰 Q: What economic growth rates become possible with early humanoid robot adoption? A: Spinning up the humanoid robot flywheel early enables exponential economic growth rates of 20–100% per year, unlocking unprecedented prosperity and catapulting societies up the curve over the next 15 years.

⚡ Q: Which countries or entities will likely lead the humanoid robot transformation? A: Outsiders rather than incumbents or centers of power will lead the transformation to a new economic paradigm, as history shows leadership typically comes from the edge rather than the status quo.

Continue reading “The Robot Revolution Is Closer Than You Think” | >

Italy fines Apple $116 million over App Store privacy policy issues

Italy’s competition authority (AGCM) has fined Apple €98.6 million ($116 million) for using the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) privacy framework to abuse its dominant market position in mobile app advertising.

ATT requires developers to request consent to collect their data for targeted advertising before tracking them across websites, apps, and services owned by other companies. Apple introduced ATT in June 2020 and began enforcing it in April 2021 with the release of iOS 14.5 and iPadOS 14.5.

As the AGCM said in a Monday press release following a two-year investigation, Apple’s ATT policy requires third-party apps to display a standardized prompt requesting user permission to track activity across other companies’ apps and websites.

NitroGen: A Foundation Model for Generalist Gaming Agents

We introduce NitroGen, a vision-action foundation model for generalist gaming agents that is trained on 40,000 hours of gameplay videos across more than 1,000 games. We incorporate three key ingredients: 1) an internet-scale video-action dataset constructed by automatically extracting player actions from publicly available gameplay videos, 2) a multi-game benchmark environment that can measure cross-game generalization, and 3) a unified vision-action policy trained with large-scale behavior cloning. NitroGen exhibits strong competence across diverse domains, including combat encounters in 3D action games, high-precision control in 2D platformers, and exploration in procedurally generated worlds. It transfers effectively to unseen games, achieving up to 52% relative improvement in task success rates over models trained from scratch.

Scientists unravel neural networks that guide guilt and shame-driven behaviors

Feelings of guilt and shame can lead us to behave in a variety of different ways, including trying to make amends or save face, cooperating more with others or avoiding people altogether. Now, researchers have shed light on how the two emotions emerge from cognitive processes and in turn guide how we respond to them.

Their study is published in eLife. The editors say it provides compelling behavioral, computational and neural evidence to explain the cognitive link between emotions and compensatory actions. They add that the findings have broad theoretical and practical implications across a range of disciplines concerned with human behavior, including psychology, neuroscience, public policy and psychiatry.

For those living with dementia, new study suggests shingles vaccine could slow the disease

An unusual public health policy in Wales may have produced the strongest evidence yet that a vaccine can reduce the risk of dementia. In a new study led by Stanford Medicine, researchers analyzing the health records of Welsh older adults discovered that those who received the shingles vaccine were 20% less likely to develop dementia over the next seven years than those who did not receive the vaccine.

The remarkable findings, published April 2 in Nature, support an emerging theory that viruses that affect the nervous system can increase the risk of dementia. If further confirmed, the new findings suggest that a preventive intervention for dementia is already close at hand.

In a follow-up study published Dec. 2 in Cell, the researchers found that the vaccine may also benefit those already diagnosed with dementia by slowing the progress of the disease.

Microsoft to secure Entra ID sign-ins from script injection attacks

Microsoft plans to enhance the security of the Entra ID authentication system against external script injection attacks starting in mid-to-late October 2026.

This update will implement a strengthened Content Security Policy that allows script downloads only from Microsoft-trusted content delivery network domains and inline script execution only from Microsoft-trusted sources during sign-ins.

After rollout, it will protect users against various security risks, including cross-site scripting attacks in which attackers inject malicious code into websites to steal credentials or compromise systems.

Scientists Call Age-25 Cannabis Rules a Myth

“This Perspective concludes that an MLA between 18–21 years is a scientifically supportable and socially coherent threshold for non-medical cannabis use.”

What should be the minimum legal age for recreational cannabis? This is what a recent study published in The American Journal on Drug and Alcohol Abuse hopes to address as a team of scientists investigated the benefits and challenges of raising the legal age for using recreational marijuana to 25, with the current age range being 18 to 21, depending on the country. This study has the potential to help researchers, legislators, and the public better understand the neuroscience behind the appropriate age for cannabis use.

For the study, the researchers examined brain development for individuals aged 18–25, specifically regarding brain maturation and whether this ceases before age 25. They note it depends on a myriad of factors, including sex, geographic region, and physiology. This study comes as Germany recently published several studies regarding legalizing recreational marijuana nationwide and marijuana use rates post-legalization. In the end, the researchers for this most recent study concluded that raising the minimum legal age for recreational cannabis use to 25 is unnecessary.

The study notes, “This Perspective concludes that an MLA between 18–21 years is a scientifically supportable and socially coherent threshold for non-medical cannabis use. Policy decisions should be informed not only by neurobiological evidence but also by legal, justice, sociocultural, psychological, and historical considerations.”

Invasive Israeli-founded bloatware is harvesting data from Samsung users in WANA

IronSource Expands Samsung Partnership, Launching on Samsung Mobile Devices in MENA https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20221103005106/en/iro
es-in-MENA

Across West Asia and North Africa (WANA), growing concerns about digital surveillance have placed Israeli cybersecurity firms and their software under intense scrutiny. Among the most alarming cases is AppCloud, a pre-installed application on Samsung’s A and M series smartphones.

The bloatware cannot be uninstalled easily because it runs on the device’s operating system. Uninstalling it requires root access (the highest level of control in a computer system) of the phone to remove the AppCloud package. Its privacy policy is nowhere to be found online and opting out is not always available.

But the real concern lies in who owns AppCloud. When investigating further, we discovered that AppCloud’s privacy policy can be traced back to the controversial Israeli-founded company ironSource (now owned by the American company Unity). ironSource is notorious for its questionable practices regarding user consent and data privacy.

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