AI needs to augment rather than replace humans or the workplace is doomed | Heather Stewart

“Who wouldn’t want a robot to watch over your kids?” Elon Musk asked Davos delegates last week, as he looked forward with enthusiasm to a world with “more robots than people”.Not me, thanks: children need the human connection – the love – that gives life meaning.As he works towards launching SpaceX on to the stock market, in perhaps the biggest ever such share sale, the world’s richest man has every incentive to talk big.Yet as Musk waxed eccentrically about this robotic utopia, it was a reminder that major decisions about the direction of technological progress are being taken by a small number of very powerful men – and they are mainly men.In the cosy onstage chat, the World Economic Forum’s interim co-chair, Larry Fink, failed to ask Musk about whichever tweak of internal plumbing allowed his Grok chatbot to produce and broadcast what a New York Times investigation estimated was 1

Young will suffer most when AI ‘tsunami’ hits jobs, says head of IMF

Artificial intelligence will be a “tsunami hitting the labour market”, with young people worst affected, the head of the International Monetary Fund warned the World Economic Forum on Friday.Kristalina Georgieva told delegates in Davos that the IMF’s own research suggested there would be a big transformation of demand for skills, as the technology becomes increasingly widespread.“We expect over the next years, in advanced economies, 60% of jobs to be affected by AI, either enhanced or eliminated or transformed – 40% globally,” she said. “This is like a tsunami hitting the labour market.”She suggested that in advanced economies, one in 10 jobs had already been “enhanced” by AI, tending to boost these workers’ pay, with knock-on benefits for the local economy

Campaigner launches £1.5bn legal action in UK against Apple over wallet’s ‘hidden fees’

The financial campaigner James Daley has launched a £1.5bn class action lawsuit against Apple over its mobile phone wallet, claiming the US tech company blocked competition and charged hidden fees that ultimately harmed 50 million UK consumers.The lawsuit takes aim at Apple Pay, which they say has been the only contactless payment service available for iPhone users in Britain over the past decade.Daley, who is the founder of the advocacy group Fairer Finance, claims this situation amounted to anti-competitive behaviour and allowed Apple to charge hidden fees, ultimately pushing up costs for banks that passed charges on to consumers, regardless of whether they owned an iPhone.It is the first UK legal challenge to the company’s conduct in relation to Apple Pay, and takes place months after regulators like the Competition and Markets Authority and the Payments Systems Regulator began scrutinising the tech industry’s digital wallet services

Grok AI generated about 3m sexualised images in 11 days, study finds

Grok AI generated about 3m sexualised images in less than two weeks, including 23,000 that appear to depict children, according to researchers who said it “became an industrial-scale machine for the production of sexual abuse material”.The estimate has been made by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) after Elon Musk’s AI image generation tool sparked international outrage when it allowed users to upload photographs of strangers and celebrities, digitally strip them to their underwear or into bikinis, put them in provocative poses and post the images on X.The trend went viral over the new year, peaking on 2 January with 199,612 individual requests, according to analysis conducted by Peryton Intelligence, a digital intelligence company specialising in online hate.A fuller assessment of the output from the feature, from its launch on 29 December 2025 until 8 January 2026, has now been made by the CCDH. It suggests the impact of the technology may have been broader than previously thought

Why Trump is worried datacenters might cost his party an election

Donald Trump is worried about datacenters. Specifically, he is concerned about their effects on an already expensive electricity market in the United States. Will Americans’ resentment of sharply rising energy costs scuttle his party’s November election ambitions?The US president’s anxiety is evident in two actions in recent weeks. On 13 January, Trump and Microsoft’s president jointly announced that the tech giant would pay more for its datacenters, paying full property taxes and accepting neither tax reductions nor electricity rate discounts in towns where it operates datacenters.“We are the ‘HOTTEST’ Country in the World, and Number One in AI

Tell us: has a chatbot helped you out of a difficult time in your life?

AI Chatbots are now a part of everyday life. ChatGPT surpassed 800 million weekly active users in late 2025. Some people are forming relationships with these chatbots, using them for companionship, mental health support, and even as therapists. Has a chatbot helped you get through a difficult period in life? If so, we’d like to hear about it.You can tell us how an AI chatbot has helped you get through a difficult period in life using this form