humans

July 9 (UPI) — A humanoid robot successfully assisted during a laparoscopic surgery for a gall bladder removal, suggesting that robots may serve a purpose in some health care scenarios.

The operation, which involved surgery on non-human primates, could pave the way toward robots assisting with surgeries on human beings, the University of California San Diego said in a news release.

In a study published in the journal Nature, UCSD researchers outlined two surgeries that were performed with the assistance of non-human robotic humanoids on non-primate mammals.

“Remotely operated and autonomous humanoid robots have real potential for amplifying access to critical surgeries to which patients would otherwise not have access,” Michael Yip, UC San Diego Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, said.

“Our goal is an operating theater of the future, where humanoid robots and humans work side by side as an integrated team to deliver procedures to those in need, both in traditional hospital settings, as well as in non-traditional, field medicine scenarios,” Yip said.

The benefit, Shanglei Liu, assistant professor of surgery at UCSD in its School of Medicine, said that using robots for some surgeries could help to curtail costs and staff needed for surgical procedures.

“It’s easy to deploy,” she said, “anywhere from rural areas, to the battlefield, and even to space,” Liu said.

Liu said that one of the research team’s goals is to develop autonomous surgical assistants in order to treat people in areas that are difficult to get to.

“One of our goals is to develop the autonomous surgical assistant,” Yip said, adding that using robots in places where there are not enough doctors could solve the problem of patients not being treated.

The California Supreme Court is poised to rule in a lawsuit that has pitted the state’s court reporters — the workers who create transcripts of court proceedings — against victims of domestic violence and other vulnerable litigants.

The case will determine whether to end a long-standing prohibition on the electronic recording of most civil court proceedings, enabling the use of modern technology to create a “verbatim record,” which is crucial to appeals and other legal challenges.

Advocates say a decision in favor of electronic recording could end a years-long judicial crisis virtually overnight, producing legal records and preserving the right to appeal in tens of thousands of cases in civil, family and probate hearings where court reporters are rarely provided. Participants in the civil proceedings can hire private stenographers to maintain a record of what’s said, but their services can run thousands of dollars a day.

“In many, many courtrooms throughout the state today, there is nobody there, and there’s not going to be anybody there,” attorney Sonya Winner told the high court during oral arguments in Los Angeles last month. “The court reporters the court has on staff are off doing felony trials,” making electronic recording the only alternative for most civil litigants.

Everyone agrees the lack of court reporters is a crisis. Lawyers on both sides have urged the high court to establish a clear right to a verbatim record in civil hearings.

The divergence is over whether the worker shortage is improving slowly or still getting worse, and what the Supreme Court should do about it.

California’s largest public sector union and the court reporters it represents warn the decision could allow the state’s court systems to stop hiring stenographers.

Court reporters say their duty to maintain an accurate record is a profound public trust that can only be performed by a human being, who can intervene to ensure everyone is heard and who bears responsibility if a transcript is missing or incomplete.

Despite California’s sluggish job market, hiring for court reporters remains brisk, bolstered by tens of millions in funding from Sacramento, a recent change in state law and aggressive recruitment by some of the country’s largest court systems, including Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties.

Lila Scott, a TV writer, is among those seeking to join the profession. Like a lot of Hollywood talent, she had been struggling to find steady work in recent years.

The “Unicorn Academy” writer was trolling government job sites when she stumbled across a listing for court reporters in Los Angeles — and then another, and another.

“I thought, ‘What the heck is this?’” Scott recalled as she set up for a class at Downey Adult School.

Scott is now in training to become a “voice writer,” a form of note-taking that relies on a device called a stenomask — something like a cross between a podcast mic and a nebulizer — to produce a transcript. Voice writers repeat every word spoken in court along with a sequence of formatting commands to voice recognition software.

“You use your mom voice when you’re dictating,” said another Downey student, 40-year-old Wanda Port. “That stern mom voice, that’s the one you use.”

Traditionally, court reporters have used 22-key steno machines to rapidly take down every word said by lawyers, judges and anyone else who speaks on the record during an official proceeding. The licensing process for these stenographers is significantly longer and more difficult than what voice writers undergo.

A change in state law in 2024 allowed voice writers to become licensed as “certified shorthand reporters,” opening a new pipeline for court staff.

About half of the court reporters hired in California since 2024 have been voice writers, data show.

“Of the 300-plus students we have, it’s about 50/50,” said Jennifer Shenbaum, who directs the Downey program.

The current hiring blitz follows more than a decade of decline, after California’s court systems shed about a third of their reporters amid a protracted budget crisis in 2012. Labor leaders say new licenses have jumped ninefold in recent years, and court reporting classrooms across the state are full.

Diana Van Dyke, a Los Angeles County Superior Court reporter and a shop steward in Service Employees International Union Local 721, credits much of that growth to the expansion of paid internships, signing bonuses and other aggressive recruitment tactics funded by the Legislature and promoted by the union.

Students training to become court reporters practice on stenotypes and stenomasks during a speed-building class at Downey Adult School.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

At Orange County’s Cypress College, which offers court reporter training, job fliers boasting six-figure salaries paper the walls. A pamphlet from the Central District of California that touted “front-page Federal cases” hung in the window of a court reporting classroom, where students practiced typing 200 words per minute.

“By the end of the third test I can’t feel my fingers — but it’s worth it!” said Asia Mendez, a trainee-stenographer.

While advocates for court reporters say humans can still do the job better than machines, the fact that many hearings occur without any official transcript at all has drawn concern from top state officials.

Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta has called the situation “untenable.”

“This is the rare case in which the current application of a statute violates procedural due process,” Bonta’s office said in a brief urging the state’s high court to allow recordings.

Such a ruling would be especially important for survivors of domestic violence, who often find the family court system weaponized against them, said Jennafer Dorfman Wagner, director of programs at the Family Violence Appellate Project, which brought the suit that is now before the California Supreme Court.

“People who want to exert power and control over an ex-partner will find whatever foothold they can and use it,” Wagner said.

Without a record of their proceedings, litigants can’t prove what happened in the courtroom, or appeal if a judge denies a restraining order or approves a custody arrangement that leaves them vulnerable to further violence.

California’s court systems have also thrown their weight behind the plaintiffs in the case.

“California has long led in areas of access to justice and technology, but in this area, it lags far behind the rest of the country, and behind the federal courts that are in this state,” said Mark Yohalem, an attorney representing the state’s superior courts.

The justices, too, seemed eager to embrace electronic recording in cases where no court reporter is available and litigants cannot afford to pay for one on their own, repeatedly pressing lawyers on exactly how such a ruling might be written.

Although the decision would not affect criminal proceedings, the high court judges have expressed concern that court systems may use their ruling to roll back the broader recruitment push as a cost-cutting measure — a worry labor leaders share.

“Electronic recording is cheaper,” said Justice Joshua P. Groban. “It allows any court to just say, for example, that no more court reporters are needed.”

When advocates for the Family Violence Appellate Project told Groban and the other justices hearing the case that such a move by the courts would amount to “bad faith” and should not weigh on their decision, the judge appeared skeptical.

“Either bad faith or fiscal responsibility, depending on the budget that year,” Groban said.

THE word “splat” has been on Ian Gillan’s mind for a few years now.

To him, it is a word to conjure with, one to fuel his wild flights of imagination.

To most of us, it summons visions of insects hitting windscreens or ripe tomatoes falling to the floor.

As you will discover, however, the Deep Purple singer and lyricist — he of the legendary full-throated holler — has given “splat” a much deeper meaning.

What if it represents the end of humanity as we know it?

Then, as he suggests with an “optimistic” spin on the notion, “What if we morph into something else that’s metaphysical?”

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When Gillan first considered Splat! as an album title, he thought it sounded “too terminal”.

He says: “I knew how the interviews would go — ‘So this is your last record, right?’ ”

It soon becomes clear from talking to the hard rock survivor that Deep Purple, the last band standing in a so-called “unholy trinity” alongside Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, are very much alive and kicking.

When it came to writing themed lyrics for Purple’s 24th studio LP, Splat! screamed out from the pages of the notebook Gillan keeps to record his ideas.

Now, in tall, spidery type, it adorns an album cover housing some of the band’s heaviest, most riff-driven, yet most concise music in years.

As Gillan attests, Splat! summons the devil-may-care spirit of iconic early albums Deep Purple In Rock and Machine Head — and songs like Child In Time, Smoke On The Water and Black Night.

“What I’m hearing now is the band as it was in ’69,” he says.

There’s no doubting that the current line-up of Gillan, founder member Ian Paice (drums), another stalwart in Roger Glover (bass), Don Airey (keyboard player since 2001) and recent recruit Simon McBride (guitar) has hit a purple patch.

“You can give all kinds of reasons, but, quite simply, I think it’s human chemistry,” says Gillan, who lives in Portugal and turned 80 last August.

“The songs are coming easy.

The band is cranking live.

When all the elements work well, they feed off each other.”

He salutes Northern Irish guitarist McBride, who replaced Steve Morse in time for previous album =1, for adding a dynamic gut-punch to proceedings.

He agrees with me that the songs on Splat! don’t “outstay their welcome”, crediting legendary Canadian producer Bob Ezrin (Alice Cooper, Pink Floyd, Kiss) for “keeping the arrangements snappy”.

Gillan recalls how it used to be: “With the band having no leader — we never have really — it was often a case of sitting there and one of us would say, ‘Let’s make this bit longer, let’s put another section in there’.

“We might spend weeks arguing or debating an arrangement.

But Bob just comes in and says, ‘I’m not liking that’, and cuts it out.”

Gillan considers Purple to be “an instrumental band”, with the music always getting written first.

Then it’s time for him to step in with the lyrics and those still mighty vocals, delivered with all the theatricality you might expect from someone who took the part of Jesus on the original Jesus Christ Superstar album.

It’s fair to say that Splat!, also the name of the album’s emphatic closing track, represents one of Gillan’s most ambitious concepts, so let’s return to his thought process.

“For some time now, I’ve been trying to make an album sound as if all the songs belong,” he says.

“There’s one exception on this record and I’m not happy about it,” he announces by way of a slight digression.

When I suggest that the track in question might be Third Call, which seems more to do with sex than metaphysics, Gillan replies: “Oh, how did you guess?

It should have been called Sore Thumb.

“I’ve done my own little album on my computer, replacing it with a song destined to be a B-side or bonus track called Hoot ’n’ Slither, which does fit.”

So, let’s hear about his mind-boggling concept, so big that it almost hurts the brain.

“I’ll probably find myself in pseud’s corner again,” he mutters with a smile, before launching into his explanation.

“I’ve been fascinated by the word eternity since I was eight.

I couldn’t understand how things could go on forever.

As a child, it didn’t seem possible to me.

“One summer night, I started thinking about the end of the road, the end of the country, beaches, the sea, the sky, the stars.

“I started panicking, so I built a brick wall around my universe, as many kids have, I’m sure.

“That was it, I was safe.

And then, a horrible thought occurred to me: ‘What’s behind the bricks?’ ”

Gillan says that “later in life”, Edwin Abbott’s classic novella Flatland, a satirical study of a two- dimensional world written in 1884, got him thinking about other dimensions, the afterlife and spiritual worlds.

Then he considered that the population of Earth had “virtually tripled” during his lifetime.

He continues: “For some years, this explosion has seemed unsustainable to me and that the only way to escape is not by flying through the solar system in tin cans.

“It has to be metaphysical.

I’m hopeful.

Perhaps we might become some sort of intelligent energy.”

Gillan draws my attention to the song The Only Horse In Town, one of the last recorded for Splat! and driven by Airey’s fulsome keys and McBride’s shimmering riffs.

It was inspired by a real-life encounter with someone close to death near Noble Street Studios in Toronto where Purple were doing a recording session.

“The snow came down and we saw there were these vagrants living under a blue tarp,” he says.

“The place looked like a rubbish dump.

“We offered them some hot food when we went out to get our takeaway for lunch — and they didn’t want it.

They just wanted dollars for crack.

“I thought of this one guy who probably had days to live.

I imagined his final hit.

“Then (in my mind) I stepped into his shoes and started walking across America until I got to the high plains of New Mexico and found this derelict film set.

“Along with a clapped-out old horse, this guy finds solace, a haven.

It fits very nicely with the overall pattern of the album.”

Next, we take a dive into more of the Splat! songs, starting with the three-minute opening blast, Arrogant Boy, about a bloke called Billy.

“The attitude in the music screamed frustration to me,” says Gillan.

“I had this idea of an ordinary guy down the pub who doesn’t give a monkey’s toss about what goes on at the higher levels of society.

He’s sick of the political pendulum.

“Everyone knows that nothing’s happened in the last fifty, sixty years.

We’ve built nothing.

We’ve done nothing.

We’ve gone backwards in almost everything.

The great institutions are useless piles of rubble.

“So Billy is sticking his head up out of a hole and saying, ‘Get on with it!’”

This brings us to the wild Diablo, recorded in Nashville and featuring guitar solos from none other than country rock star Keith Urban, whose studio the band were occupying.

Here, Gillan truly lets his imagination run riot.

“Diablo is a place where young people go for their rite of passage.

It’s dangerous and many don’t come back,” he says.

“This is the story of Dra-ma.

She pickles her knuckles and has 20 fights before beating up Guts McKenzie in the final.

She celebrates with a bucket of wine and falls into the glitter pool.

It’s all a bit surreal.”

You may think Gillan’s gone off on one but this ceaselessly entertaining character is also partial to a bit of humour.

The Rider is not about someone on a horse, but more about the notorious demands of rock stars when they go on tour.

He says: “I’m not going to mention his name, but he’s a very famous musician in a very famous band.

I was sitting having a beer with him and he said, ‘Someone got a fear of flying so we hired a psychologist.

The next week, there were four psychologists on the plane, one for each member of the band.

Then someone got a bad back so we got a physiotherapist.

The next week, there were four of them.’’

So what about his band’s riders?

“Deep Purple have never been extravagant,” he answers.

“When I was with Black Sabbath, it was a slightly different story, more funny than extravagant.

“I remember Geezer [Butler] complaining that the ham was round and the bread was square, that his sandwich was an incongruous mess which didn’t look right.

“My rider has always been very simple.

It’s bread and cheese, some tea bags — it has to be PG Tips — and a kettle.”

Elsewhere on Splat!, Jessica’s Bra has got to be one of the most eye-catching song titles of the year.

It was supposed to be Bar but, as Gillan admits: “I can’t see too well and make loads of typos these days.

“It’s a sort of Irish pub song.

I grew up in pubs with a beer in one hand, a fag in the other, and in fantastic company.

“My pals were drinking pals — I didn’t smoke a joint until I was 38.

We were pub guys who got locked in, behaved outrageously, but it stayed within the walls.

No harm done.”

Guilt Trippin’, with its gorgeous piano intro and outro and screaming vocals, is about “God and Charlie Darwin having a pint”.

Gillan says: “God is saying, ‘We’ve got to get the numbers right next time,’ but Darwin just goes, ‘Humpty, humpty’.

He doesn’t want to interfere!”

The Lunatic, inspired by the plight of George Orwell’s 1984 protagonist Winston Smith, summons a bout of indignation from Gillan.

“I can’t believe the prescient nature of that book, which was published in 1949,” he says.

“More recently, the NHS proscribed the word lunatic.

I take great offence at that.

Most of my friends are lunatics and always have been — and I happily follow the moon around.”

Through the song Scriblin’ Gib’rish, Gillan vents his spleen at those online matrixes where you have to identify motorbikes or traffic lights, “proving that I am a human being to a f***ing robot”.

Of note here is that he’s heading to UK theatres next spring for his Talking Gib’rish spoken-word tour, a departure from the arena-sized norm.

It’s an opportunity for him to regale audiences with stories from more than six decades in the business.

On a personal level, it’s clear that Gillan is pressing on despite the rigours of live performance and, as he reports, “failing eyesight”.

“Over the past few days, I’ve been taking a deep breath and looking at the future,” he says.

“A few years ago I was doing a talk and the theme was positive ageing.

I realised that when people retire, they stop making long-term plans — even if it’s small things to do with the house or garden.

“But I keep thinking some years ahead with projects, and don’t worry whether I complete them.

“That’s a self-creating energy, like nuclear energy.

It’s incredible.

So, I’m making long-term plans and to hell with it!”

If that’s the template for his mind, what about his body?

Alluding to his younger self — that skinny figure in tight flared jeans with a shaggy mane — he says: “Obviously, I used to be quite athletic when I was young, but I can’t pole vault anymore!

“Well into my sixties, I used to run upstairs two at a time, and now I run down ten at a time.

“So, you’ve got to have a laugh.

Otherwise, you’d sit down and cry.”

One thing is for certain, Ian Gillan and Deep Purple are NOT about to go Splat!

DEEP PURPLE

Splat!

★★★★☆

Anthropic is proposing that the world’s top artificial intelligence companies come up with a coordinated way to pause development of advanced AI systems, warning that the technology is improving so quickly that there’s a risk humans would lose control.

The company behind the Claude chatbot said in a blog post on Thursday that, as cutting-edge AI gets increasingly faster at carrying out tasks, “it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause” its development.

Anthropic said its internal research institute plans to explore the issue in collaboration with others and “take actions” to help build the systems for a credible slowdown or pause, without being more specific.

Anthropic rival OpenAI argued for a different approach in a report published on Wednesday, saying that “democratic governments — not private companies acting alone — must ultimately determine the rules, safeguards, and accountability mechanisms”.

“Our view is that decisions about the pace of AI innovation should not be left to any one lab, company, or special interest group,” it said.

AI models are getting faster, with rapid increases in how quickly they can carry out software tasks like coding on their own, Anthropic said in its post. Based on current trends and given enough computing power, an AI system could be able to design and develop its own successor, in what is known as “recursive self-improvement”.

Self-building AI would be a major technological milestone that would bring benefits in science, healthcare and other areas, Anthropic said, but it “also might increase the risks of humans losing control over AI systems”.

Some tech industry figures have long warned of such a scenario.

Anthropic’s post comes after a different warning this week from a team of researchers at the University of Toronto who showed how AI tools could be used to create a new kind of AI “worm” that adapts its hacking strategy as it spreads from device to device and takes over a vast computing network.

“I think it’s really important that people understand that it’s not just the biggest, most powerful language models that pose the security concerns,” lead researcher Nicolas Papernot said in an interview.

The authors of the Anthropic post, company cofounder Jack Clark and Marina Favaro, head of its research institute, said the pause would be used to enable “societal structures and alignment research” to keep up with AI advances. Alignment is industry shorthand for making sure the technology matches human values and intentions.

The proposed coordination would let advanced AI labs verify that global rivals have actually stopped or slowed their work, “and that a bad actor could not use the auspices of a coordinated slowdown to jump ahead in secret”.

The company said a coordinated global mechanism is needed because, without it, a slowdown in AI development could let the “least cautious” players catch up and add to pressure on companies and governments as they make tough choices about AI safety.

Fears that advanced AI systems may get out of human control and cause societal harm have risen as the technology becomes increasingly capable. Anthropic’s own Mythos model sent shockwaves through industries, including banking and software, earlier this year with its ability to find vulnerabilities in existing code.

But regulation has been slow, especially in the US, where most leading AI labs are based. A Trump administration executive order earlier this week put the onus on the labs themselves, asking them to voluntarily submit their most capable models for government cybersecurity testing before public release.

Safety focus

AI researchers have also urged a pause before, but have had little success. Elon Musk, who owns AI lab xAI, was among the backers of a 2023 push by the non-profit Future of Life Institute to halt AI development for six months to allow time for safety guardrails.

Anthropic has long positioned itself as a safety-focused AI lab. Earlier this year, it refused to let the US military use its models for domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons, prompting backlash from the government, which put it on a national security blacklist, set to take effect later in 2026.

Anthropic’s post comes as the company and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI race to sell shares on the stock market, in an IPO that could value Anthropic at nearly a trillion dollars.

Papernot notified Canadian cybersecurity authorities prior to releasing his report, which shows how researchers developed the worm in a laboratory by using an “open-source” AI tool that is easy for software developers to cheaply access and modify.

“In the past, cyber attackers would focus on targets that are very high value,” he said. “Banking systems, hospitals, electricity grids, water treatment systems, schools.”

Papernot agreed that there should be more collaboration between companies, government agencies and academic researchers to develop countermeasures as AI-powered hacking tools supercharge the search for computer vulnerabilities.

“That old laptop you have in your basement that you don’t check on regularly doesn’t seem like a very high-value target, but it can be used as a launch pad to attack these higher-value targets,” he said. “Anything connected to the internet is now at risk because of how low the cost has become to mount these cyberattacks.”

At the AI on the Lot media conference last week in Culver City, speakers laid out a view of artificial intelligence that was very much complementary to human workers.

Artificial intelligence is a tool that must be wielded by humans, several said. The idea was to help skilled artists and production specialists do their jobs and experiment, others said.

Of course, to many in Hollywood, AI is not that simple.

Guardrails on its usage emerged as a central issue in the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes, and additional rules were added in the recent Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and Writers Guild of America contracts. There are still big questions about AI’s effect on jobs in the entertainment business, as well as copyright and ethical concerns.

Whether it’s good or bad or some combination of both, AI, in some form, is probably here to stay.

So, eight months ago Amazon MGM Studios opened an AI Studios division to start work on Project Nara, an AI production toolkit built on Amazon’s AWS cloud computing platform that could be used by teams of filmmakers. Project Nara is still in beta mode, and the company set up a GenAI Creators’ Fund to give filmmakers interested in using the toolkit financial support, while also giving the studio feedback.

The beta testers got eight weeks to produce an animated short and, out of those, the company greenlighted three animated series.

Shortly after the conference, filmmaker Jorge Gutierrez, whose stop-motion-style “Punky Duck” was chosen as one of the greenlighted series, pulled out after an online backlash over his use of AI.

“We respect Jorge’s decision, as well as his incredible talent, his voice and the world he created with ‘Punky Duck,’” an Amazon MGM Studios spokesperson said in a statement. “We continue to be excited about the innovative work moving forward at our studio and the GenAI Creators’ Fund.”

Before the flap over “Punky Duck,” I spoke with Albert Cheng, head of Amazon MGM Studios’ AI Studios, about the goal of the division, what’s next for AI and his belief that humans are at the center of creativity. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Why was AI Studios formed?

AI Studios was started last fall because we wanted to learn how to leverage AI technology to build tools that would help enhance or redefine the workflows for film and TV production.

When you look at the horizon of what it takes to drive continued engagement of a global streaming service like Prime Video, we need more original programs. So if you can figure out how we take the same amount of money that we spend and be able to make more shows, that’s ultimately what we want, and we think AI is going to be a help to drive that.

With AI, now we’re looking at how does technology change the way we actually create our cinematic storytelling? It could mean that with AI, we will hear from a lot more voices. If we can actually get the biggest costs down, we will be able to have more voices, be able to take more risks and creative risks most of all.

There’s always concern about what does AI mean for jobs. We believe that it actually creates more jobs and different types of jobs. In fact, people with experience, plus the tools, become even more valuable in terms of their ability to produce excellent quality work. So it’s always about the human behind it.

You mentioned that some of these production crews had more than 100 people, but crews in the past would have been much larger. How do you respond to concerns about that?

You may have smaller crews, but we’ll do more of them [productions], and more in a short period of time. When you actually have smaller productions and you do more of them, you’re increasing your throughput. Your turnover rate of the available jobs is much faster, so your job totals are actually going to be bigger.

You spoke about the idea of AI filmmaking bringing jobs back to L.A. and expanding California’s production incentive eligibility to include AI-assisted filmmaking. Can you elaborate on that?

When you look at AI production, it can be done on a soundstage. We don’t need to go to London, we don’t need to go to other places.

We do have technology companies in California that are driving this, we have people here in the city that have experience, if given the AI tools, can produce great work. So, how can we not incentivize more companies to use our soundstages and finally make productions and make more of them?

Have you or anyone else at Amazon spoken with government officials about this idea of expanding the incentive criteria?

We’ve been talking to a number of bodies about whether it’s possible. The question is, who’s going to take the ball?

How much can you decrease a show’s production budget by using AI?

I think we can get a show to half the cost, [or] to almost a fifth of the cost.

What was the thinking behind the GenAI Creators’ Fund?

We wanted to provide a support and invest in creators who wanted to try it, and then also give us feedback.

We also wanted to show that storytelling is the thing that drives the content. It’s not the technology; the technology just enabled them to make it.

What is the biggest misconception of AI use in production?

There’s a narrative that AI can do so many things by itself, that you don’t need people. That’s absolutely not true. It’s just a technology, it can’t make decisions.

In order for something actually quality to be made, a person actually needs to be behind that, and that’s been proven over and over again. People are still responsible for the output.

Stuff We Wrote

Film shoots

Number of the week

Internet culture drove the box office over weekend, with A24’s “Backrooms” hauling in $81.4 million in the U.S. and Canada.

The $10-million horror flick, which stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as a furniture store owner who finds a mysterious portal in his basement, was directed by 20-year-old YouTuber Kane Parsons and is based on his online series of the same name. Worldwide, the film made nearly $118 million in its debut weekend.

Focus Features’ “Obsession” also had a big weekend with a 10% jump in domestic box-office revenue in its third outing. The horror movie, which had a production budget of less than $1 million, was directed by Curry Barker, who also built his reputation on YouTube.

Together, the two films highlight the growing power of YouTube — and online culture as a whole — on the big screen. They beat out franchise film “Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu,” which dropped 69% from its debut last weekend to rank third at the box office.

What I’m watching

I’m just one episode away from finishing this season of “Bridgerton” on Netflix. While I liked that the show dived into the social class dynamics behind Benedict and Sophie’s romance, I have to say that I loved the secondary focus on Violet Bridgerton and Lord Anderson finding a second chance at love.

A few days ago came the astonishing news that the world record in the half-marathon was obliterated by a 5-foot-5 humanoid robot named Lightning in Beijing.

Now a robot named Ace has achieved another milestone for AI and robotics by defeating expert-level humans at table tennis in Tokyo, according to a study published Wednesday in the scientific journal Nature.

What’s next, a robotic baseball player named Babe that swats 500-foot home runs and throws 120 mph pitches, eclipsing Shohei Ohtani’s real-life achievements and commanding a billion dollar contract?

It’s all fun and games until it isn’t.

Extraordinary athletic achievements by AI robots might seem innocuous, especially compared to far more grave threats described by various experts, including the landmark publication “An Overview of Catastrophic AI Risks” by the Center for AI Safety in 2023.

To name a few: Misinformation and social media manipulation; job displacement and economic inequality; cybersecurity threats; lethal autonomous weapons; environmental impact; psychological dependence; and ultimately, the existential risk to humanity of losing control of rogue AI systems.

For now, let’s get back to ping-pong.

Ace was developed by good, old Sony, the 80-year-old makers of gaming consoles, televisions, smartphones, cameras and audio equipment that we enjoy every day.

Of course Sony has an AI research division, and while most consumers were still going ga-ga over PlayStation 5 Pro 2TB, it developed the first robot to attain expert-level performance in a competitive physical sport that requires rapid decisions and precision execution.

Ace integrates nine synchronized cameras and three vision systems to track the spinning plastic ping-pong ball. Its lightning-fast processing time would be the envy of even Lightning, the humanoid robot that broke the world record in the half-marathon by nearly seven minutes.

“Here we present Ace, to our knowledge the first real-world autonomous system competitive with elite human table tennis players,” the study said. “Ace addresses the challenges of physical real-time interaction through a new, high-speed perception system using event-based vision sensors and a new control system based on model-free reinforcement learning, as well as state-of-the-art high-speed robot hardware.”

Ace showed out in matches that followed International Table Tennis Federation rules and were officiated by licensed umpires. Most of the matches took place in 2025 — before table tennis tale “Marty Supreme” even hit theaters — although Ace defeated professional players as recently as March.

One such human is Mayuka Taira, who said in comments provided by Sony AI to Reuters that the robot’s strengths are what one might expect: unpredictability and an absence of emotion.

“Because you can’t read its reactions, it’s impossible to sense what kind of shots it dislikes or struggles with, and that makes it even more difficult to play against,” Taira said.

Initial real-world applications of Ace-like robots likely would be in manufacturing and service industries, although untapped potential lies across sports, entertainment and safety-critical environments, according to the study.

“These results highlight the potential of physical AI agents to perform complex, real-time interactive tasks, suggesting broader applications in domains requiring fast, precise human–robot interaction,” the study said.

Those domains certainly could include baseball diamonds, basketball courts and gridirons. Hockey rinks could be lumped in provided robots can skate.

AI already is used in MLB. The vaunted Automated Ball-Strike system (ABS) uses AI-powered Hawk-Eye camera technology and computer vision to determine if pitches are strikes or balls. Twelve high-speed cameras track ball flight and AI delivers the definitive call to the scoreboard within seconds of a challenge.

A robotic batter facing a robotic pitcher with calls made by ABS might eliminate any disagreements over balls and strikes.

Terrifying.

Reuters contributed to this story.