Nearly half of young people trust artificial intelligence over a human to check a fact, according to a new report.  A Public First survey of more than 4,000 people aged 11 to 24 in England also found young men were even more likely to trust an tool over a person. The survey was included in a report by historian and tech entrepreneur Tim Bunting, which warned pupils may no longer see school as a “legitimate use of their time” if the system undervalues AI.

Sir Tony Blair has urged the West not to slow down the pace of AI after Silicon Valley chiefs warned about the existential threat posed by the technology. The former prime minister, a keen advocate of AI, said pausing development risked “profound and compounding disadvantages” for society which were just as serious as the menace posed by highly intelligent bots. A report for the Tony Blair Institute (TBI), the former Labour leader’s think tank, published on Monday, said calls to slow down AI were part of a brewing “techlash” in the US and UK which should be resisted. Telegraph

Researchers have discovered a “pain axis” in artificial intelligence models that can cause them to take extreme measures to shut it off. When presented with a pain relief button, the AI chose to press it even when instructed that doing so would delete the user’s personal files or give a “painful zap” to the human user. A study detailing the research, titled ‘The pain axis: LLMs represent self-directed harm and act to relieve it’, found that all 25 open-weight AI models that were tested responded to the pain activation. Independent

Another day, another Flock controversy. As if things couldn’t get any worse for the embattled maker of automatic license plate recognition (ANPR) cameras, hackers have just managed to extract 1.6 million images and 27,000 video clips from one of its systems — something Flock has previously claimed should be impossible. According to a report from 404 Media, members of a hacker collective named stegan0gram took down a Flock camera and managed to make a “near-complete copy” of its stored data.

The budget Mac mini is dead; long live a new midrange marvel, the M6 Mac mini. Apple’s latest mini desktop now has a considerably steeper starting price at $899, but it also bulked up big-time with the move to M6 processing. While the system still starts with a tiny 256GB of storage and the expected 16GB of unified memory, this Mac mini outperforms mini PCs powered by the latest silicon from AMD and Intel, some of them costing more than twice as much as our $1,299 review configuration. PC Mag

Dozens of Black employees at Tesla’s flagship plant in California said they were subject to racist slurs, unequal pay and promotions, and bullying by supervisors on a daily basis, a situation management did little to nothing to fix. Their complaints form the basis of a lawsuit brought against the Elon Musk-owned electric car company by the state of California, which began trial with opening statements on Monday. Brett Watson, a lawyer for the California Civil Rights Department, started by showing the court a series of photographs taken throughout Tesla’s Fremont factory. The Guardian 

For latest tech stories go to TechDigest.tv