From scrutinising sellers’ profiles and reviews to secure payments, steps to help protect you from common scam

When Maheen found a brand-new Dyson Airwrap for the bargain price of £260 on the resale website Vinted, she was thrilled. The seller’s reviews were all five-star, and she trusted in the buyer-protection policy should something go wrong.

Sold new, an Airwrap costs between £400 and £480, but Maheen did not suspect anything was amiss. “I had used Vinted many times and it was simple and straightforward. Nothing had ever gone wrong,” she says.

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The idea of ditching friends if they err has become more and more popular in the last few years. But it’s important to recognise our own failings ...

There aren’t many experiences in life that feel the same at six as they do at 60. Where, even if you’ve advanced in wisdom as well as age and can intellectualise the circumstances and better disguise your pain, the raw emotion is identical. However, being left out by your friends hurts just as much when you’re an adult as it did when you were a kid in the playground.

An old lady – her words – Mumsnet message board contributor posted an impassioned plea for advice this week, after her girl squad – not her words – began chatting about the theatre season tickets they had bought. This was the first she’d heard of it.

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George Freeman, the MP for Mid Norfolk, called the spread of misinformation through AI content a ‘dangerous development’

A Conservative MP has reported an “AI-generated deepfake” video of him announcing that he has joined Reform UK to the police, according to reports.

George Freeman, the MP for Mid Norfolk, denounced the video and, in a Facebook post , called the deliberate spread of misinformation through AI-generated content a “concerning and dangerous development”.

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The security chief of SolarWinds reflects on the Russian hack that exposed US government agencies – and the heart attack he suffered in the aftermath

Tim Brown will remember 12 December 2020 for ever.

It was the day the software company SolarWinds was notified it had been hacked by Russia.

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An upside-down mindset is emerging around the world. We have to rethink our relationship with the environment and the technology that’s caused it harm

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Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World describes a society in thrall to the values of science and technology. It is set in the futuristic World State, whose citizens are scientifically engineered to fit into a hierarchy. Eugenics, psychotropic pharmaceuticals and classical conditioning are employed to maximise stability and happiness. Huxley’s novel does not describe a conventionally authoritarian system, but one in which the desire for freedom and dignity has simply been eliminated. The World State is a radical technocracy.

It’s a satire on the consequences of importing scientific thinking into the realm of social policy. The Controllers of the World State preside over a society that has rationality and efficiency as its guiding principles, and when those principles conflict with human nature, it is human nature that is required to give way. Rather than building a society that engenders happy human beings, the Controllers seek to design human beings that can function in the society into which they are “hatched”.

The idea that we would invert our relationship with the world in this way strikes us as sinister, as antithetical to what it means to be human.

And yet something resembling this upside-down mindset is now emerging across the globe, particularly in the debate around climate change.

Having built a system that is destructive of the environment that surrounds and sustains us, we are now proposing to change … the environment! In his dystopia Huxley imagined a society that only worked when the humans within it were made into something not quite human. Today, many scientists and engineers imagine a planet that has been similarly transformed: nature itself must yield to the system. We need a technological fix .

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The private Alpha School says its students can learn faster and better – but experts warn not all may benefit from an AI boom in schools

In the world’s tech innovation epicenter, an “AI-powered” private school has made headlines for unabashedly embracing the technology.

Alpha School San Francisco, which opened its doors to K-8 students this fall, is the newest outpost of a network of 14 nationwide private schools. Its learning model entails just two hours of focused academic work per day, during which the school says students can learn twice as fast as their counterparts in traditional schools – with the help of artificial intelligence.

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From brain-rotting videos to AI creep, every technological advance seems to make it harder to work, remember, think and function independently …

Step into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab in Cambridge, US, and the future feels a little closer. Glass cabinets display prototypes of weird and wonderful creations, from tiny desktop robots to a surrealist sculpture created by an AI model prompted to design a tea set made from body parts. In the lobby, an AI waste-sorting assistant named Oscar can tell you where to put your used coffee cup. Five floors up, research scientist Nataliya Kosmyna has been working on wearable brain-computer interfaces she hopes will one day enable people who cannot speak, due to neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, to communicate using their minds.

Kosmyna spends a lot of her time reading and analysing people’s brain states. Another project she is working on is a wearable device – one prototype looks like a pair of glasses – that can tell when someone is getting confused or losing focus. Around two years ago, she began receiving out-of-the blue emails from strangers who reported that they had started using large language models such as ChatGPT and felt their brain had changed as a result. Their memories didn’t seem as good – was that even possible, they asked her? Kosmyna herself had been struck by how quickly people had already begun to rely on generative AI. She noticed colleagues using ChatGPT at work, and the applications she received from researchers hoping to join her team started to look different. Their emails were longer and more formal and, sometimes, when she interviewed candidates on Zoom, she noticed they kept pausing before responding and looking off to the side – were they getting AI to help them, she wondered, shocked. And if they were using AI, how much did they even understand of the answers they were giving?

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Measures come amid concern generative AI characters are having inappropriate conversations with under-18s

Parents will be able to block their children’s interactions with Meta’s AI character chatbots, as the tech company addresses concerns over inappropriate conversations.

The social media company is adding new safeguards to its “ teen accounts ”, which are a default setting for under-18 users, by letting parents turn off their children’s chats with AI characters. These chatbots, which are created by users, are available on Facebook, Instagram and the Meta AI app.

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