While backlash against Flock Safety and its automated license plate reader cameras is spreading across the country, the company still has one powerful fan.
President Donald Trump voiced his support for the technology over the weekend.
“I sort of like them because of that, because of law enforcement, but some people don’t,” Trump told reporters Sunday aboard Air Force One, according to The Washington Post. “They think it’s an infringement. I like them.”
Trump now joins the ranks of Doctor Doom and Darth Vader in endorsing the controversial technology.
Companies like Flock and Axon have become known in recent years for selling automated license plate reader systems to law enforcement. The systems scan license plates as vehicles pass, collecting vehicle information along with the time and location they were spotted. Police can then search that data during investigations.
Privacy advocates, however, warn that the cameras collect location data on millions of people who are not suspected of crimes, often without a warrant, probable cause, or reasonable suspicion.
There have also been reports of the systems leading to mistakes and rampant misuse by law enforcement.
Trump’s comments also come at an interesting time. With the midterm elections less than two months away, he appears to be taking a side in what has become an increasingly divisive local issue.
An August YouGov survey found that 46% of respondents opposed law enforcement using the technology in their communities, while 38% supported it.
Law enforcement agencies around the country, including the Los Angeles Police Department, have ended or suspended their Flock contracts.
This is far from the first unpopular tech position Trump has taken during his second term.
The administration has signed numerous executive orders aimed at speeding up the construction of AI infrastructure and data centers in the name of national and economic security. Still, these proposed projects have faced local opposition over electricity costs, pollution, water use, and noise.
And this weekend, Trump also pushed back on calls from some of the biggest names in AI to slow the pace of development.
“Well, I’ll say this: we’re leading China in AI. We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins,” the president said Sunday when asked about slowing AI development or increasing regulation during a golf tournament in Ireland, The Hill reports.
“And we can put guardrails, we can do this and that, but I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up, and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen,” he added.
Those comments came after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for the industry to slow the pace at which it develops more capable frontier models. His rivals OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and xAI CEO Elon Musk publicly backed his proposal.
This follows a wave of warnings from researchers inside leading AI labs that increasingly capable systems could pose serious risks if development continues faster than companies can understand or control them, including human extinction.
Trump was asked last Thursday whether he shared those concerns.
“No, I don’t have any,” Trump told reporters, according to The Hill. “I have concerns that if we don’t win AI, we’re going to be put in a very bad position. We are leading China right now by a pretty good period, I would say a year, which is, you know, considered a lot.”
It remains to be seen whether Trump’s increasingly unpopular takes on tech policy have any impact on elections this year.
There’s an entire horror subgenre devoted to the worst things you can imagine about pregnancy and new motherhood. Rosemary’s Baby will always top the list, but along with many variations on “devil spawn,” we’ve had changelings, freaky folklore, grim lessons in vampire and alien gestation, pint-sized monsters born out of rage, and more.
Writer-director Raymond Creamer’s Goody Goody embraces that legacy in appropriately gruesome ways. It also taps into survival horror, centering its home birth gone awry in a cabin deep in what sure feels like a haunted forest.
Goody Goody takes place almost entirely in a single setting and has just four cast members, bringing additional intimacy to a story that feels both anchored in the real world and pulled from the pages of a very dark fairy tale. Fans of the cult favorite The Love Witch will recognize Samantha Robinson as expectant mother Goody; she’s joined by Colby Hollman as Goody’s husband, Jayson; Zoe Renee as Jayson’s sister, Candace; and Colleen Foy as the couple’s capable but cautious midwife, Sarah.
The cast is across-the-board excellent, which is important because there’s a lot of emotional heavy lifting involved. This would be the case in any movie that devotes most of its 80-minute running time to a very difficult labor and delivery, but it’s amplified here by stressful elements, both natural and supernatural.
© Shudder
We learn in a flashback that Goody is dead-set on having Sarah as her midwife, but the feeling’s not necessarily mutual, mostly because Sarah spies some red flags right off the bat. “Don’t have a home birth in the woods” feels like reasonable advice—especially since the big day will be in the middle of the winter—but Goody is someone who insists on doing things her way.
Despite her reservations, Sarah agrees, mostly because she senses that if Goody and Jayson can’t find a midwife who’ll acquiesce to Goody’s demands, they’ll just barrel ahead on their birthing plan without one.
So there are already tensions afoot even when everything seems to be going perfectly well. There’s a portable pool set up in the living room, upbeat music is pumping, and Goody is serene and happy between contractions, wearing the special dress she’s selected for the occasion. Jayson’s there to soothe her, and Candace, who’s assisting Sarah, keeps time on Goody’s progress using a stopwatch.
The ticking clock is echoed in Goody Goody’s percussive score, and the screws begin to turn when Sarah starts to suspect something is amiss. Jayson, no doubt remembering her initial hesitation, brushes off her concerns at first—but panic rises when a blizzard rolls in, the power flickers off, and Goody’s labor starts to take a bizarre turn.
Suddenly, everyone agrees that racing to the hospital is actually the best move, but it’s hardly vindication for the increasingly anxious and terrified Sarah.
© Shudder
What happens next might not be a great surprise; as mentioned, Goody Goody follows the broader contours set down by the iconic Rosemary Woodhouse and her sisters. And if you’re hoping for heaps of exposition to explain Goody’s path to this point, you won’t find it beyond one seemingly inconsequential conversation early in the film. (Pay attention!) Goody’s unusual name is also never addressed, but let’s just say any Salem Witch Trial associations that come to mind probably aren’t coincidental.
The magic here comes more from Creamer’s direction—lots of close-ups, careful framing, and creative lighting—and his cast and crew. That includes the special effects artists, who deserve extra recognition for finding fresh ways to make a birth story feel agonizingly monstrous.
Goody Goody arrives on Shudder starting September 18.
Want more io9 news? Check out the best movies and TV shows to stream this month and all the upcoming sci-fi, fantasy, and horror books that should be on your radar.
Pottery is among the oldest human inventions known to history, but how exactly we came to discover potterymaking is something of a mystery. New findings, however, might help us answer that question.
In a new study published in the latest issue of Geomorphology, speleologist Amos Frumkin proposes what he calls the “natural kiln hypothesis,” arguing that observing wildfires taught prehistoric humans that fire permanently hardened clay. Frumkin studied geographic features from two separate periods of time around what is now the Jordan Rift Valley, and found evidence that indicated both periods saw intense episodes of wildfires and environmental erosion. Given that pottery emerged in the region at roughly a similar time as the later period of the two studied, it could be that humans noticed how natural disasters—fire—were affecting the terrain and that they could use this observation to create new tools—pottery.
“A wildfire is normally seen only as a catastrophe, but environmental disruption can also expose people to new materials and new possibilities,” said Frumkin, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. “If so, one of humanity’s most important technologies may have emerged partly from people learning to imitate what they had already seen nature do.”
For the study, Frumkin referenced two separate periods of time, separated by more than 100,000 years. The first period, roughly 129,000 to 116,000 years ago, coincided with the last interglacial period and was “characterized by extreme climatic instability” due to the “fundamental reorganization of regional weather systems,” according to the paper. The geological evidence showed signs of extreme dry spells followed by intense storm events, Frumkin added in the paper.
On the other hand, the second period took place in the early Holocene, about 11,000 to 7,000 years ago. Radiocarbon dating and chemical analysis from both periods indicated major spikes in compounds associated with fires and heavy erosion. The site also hosted one of the largest pre-pottery Neolithic settlements in the region, along with signs that humans abandoned this site at the peak of fires and erosion.
Comparing the two periods could imply several things, Frumkin wrote in the paper. To be clear, no pottery emerged in the region immediately after the last interglacial period. In that sense, that earlier period may serve as a “natural control experiment” with “different cognitive and social contexts,” he explained. Later, however, when human communities evolved to be more sedentary and social, there was more room for people to be “paradoxically creative” in the face of natural disasters, he added.
“Neolithic communities in the Jordan Valley may have watched fire transform the clay beneath and around their settlements and realized that this process could be reproduced deliberately,” Frumkin said in the statement.
Of course, Frumkin stressed that this is one explanation of many possible scenarios. First, as with most things in paleontology and archaeology, the evidence we have now is admittedly insufficient—that is, unless we can travel back in time and ask Neolithic humans directly. The theory also assumes that the natural firing of clay was very obvious to local communities, and it’s very possible that there were multiple factors that drove the invention of pottery.
Five years ago, it would’ve taken some serious mental gymnastics to find something that Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon would’ve unequivocally agreed on. But in this age of AI—when agents conspire with one another to commit cybercrimes and the president of the United States brushes off what many experts consider to be a legitimately existential threat while golfing in Ireland—stranger things have happened.
The two unlikely compatriots will meet on Tuesday at a gathering organized by the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit known for its widely endorsed calls to slow the pace of AI development and ensure humans can maintain control over the rapidly advancing technology. Both themes are likely to be the subjects du jour during the event, which has been dubbed the “Pro-Human Assembly.” They gained fresh urgency after Jacob Coxon, a former OpenAI and Anthropic employee announced last week in an X post that he had resigned from the latter due to safety concerns while accusing both companies of “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” Axios reported this morning that Coxon will deliver live remarks at the Pro-Human Assembly, but a Future of Life spokesperson told Gizmodo that he will not be attending.
To have to label anything “pro-human” is a stark sign of the times. Coxon’s very public resignation has been widely viewed as a wake-up call not only for lawmakers but also for the general public, a moment when the threat of an AI-triggered doomsday went from being a far-out sci-fi scenario discussed by tech industry insiders over beers in Palo Alto to a sobering fact of reality, much as it probably felt for Americans living in the middle of the twentieth century to suddenly wake up to the threat of a possible nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. Rather than dismissing his claims, Anthropic backed them up, with one employee bluntly stating that there was a greater than ten percent chance that AI would wipe out humanity by the end of the decade.
Over the weekend, Anthropic cofounder and CEO Dario Amodei published an essay making the case that “frontier” AI labs needed to work together to slow the pace of development, while also making sure that Chinese competitors didn’t gain the upper hand. It was quickly endorsed (speaking of unlikely alliances) by his counterparts at OpenAI and SpaceXAI, Sam Altman and Elon Musk, as well as Demis Hassabis, the Nobel laureate and recently departed CEO of Google DeepMind.
Trump, meanwhile, shrugged off all apocalyptic concerns while doubling down on so-called accelerationists’ favorite argument: If the U.S. doesn’t build superintelligence first, then China surely will.
Senator Sanders has arguably been Capitol Hill’s most vocal opponent to unconstrained AI development in recent months, calling for a sovereign wealth fund to pay American taxpayers an annual cut of AI profits and, more recently, for a full-scale ban on superintelligence. Bannon, who served as White House Chief Strategist during Trump’s first administration, has described AI as “the most dangerous technology in the history of mankind.”
Correction (11:51AM ET): This article, like the earlier Axios report, previously stated that ex-Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon will be attending Tuesday’s Pro-Human Assembly. He is not planning on attending the event, according to a Future of Life spokesperson.
Meta hasn’t even released facial recognition on its smart glasses, but it’s already getting sued for it. Parents and their children in both Illinois and California filed a proposed class action lawsuit over Meta’s leaked “NameTag” feature.
“NameTag” is the reported codename for dormant facial recognition software that Wired previously found inside the Meta AI app. According to Wired’s independent analysis of the code, NameTag is designed to be used on Meta’s smart glasses to create biometric signatures and then compare those signatures against faceprints in a database that would be stored on a user’s phone. That software, to be clear, was present on millions of devices but was never actually activated.
Wired reported at the time that how those faceprints were obtained was unclear, but this new lawsuit alleges that the underlying data could be pulled from Facebook and Instagram. Plaintiffs cite the existence of recently filed patents from Meta, including one titled “User Identity Verification without Sharing Biometric Data With Platforms,” which describes a system where biometric data taken from hardware like smart glasses can be compared against social media data like profile photos, tagged photos, or videos.
In addition to Meta’s experiments with smart glasses, the lawsuit is also singling out recently released AI models from Meta, like Emu, which was trained on Instagram and Facebook data, including pictures and text. That data, plaintiffs say, was illegally obtained from users.
Gizmodo has reached out to Meta and will update this story with any response.
This wouldn’t be the first time Meta has faced legal backlash for its use of facial recognition. In 2020, Facebook eventually agreed to an $650 million settlement after it was found to have wrongly collected the faceprints of a billion users, storing them on a company database. At the time, Meta claimed its terms of service for using Facebook were enough to constitute consent for collection.
That’s all to say that the combination of facial recognition and Meta hasn’t been a particularly welcome one, and multiplying that aversion is the fact that people don’t tend to generally trust smart glasses—and for good reason. But that’s just the way things have been going for Meta and its endeavors to put cameras on everyone’s face. Between public scrutiny, skepticism from lawmakers, and increasingly common bans, class action lawsuits are just another cost of doing business for Meta.