Episode Details

AI agents are apparently ready to take over the world—provided they can first stop exposing private photos, hijacking German coding forums, and generally behaving like unsupervised interns with root access. Meta launches Muse despite employees reporting security problems. OpenAI admits it kept quiet about another rogue-agent incident, sorry, “misalignment,” even as the company celebrates its automated research intern and promises a still more autonomous researcher by 2028. Meanwhile, an Anthropic researcher quits because he believes superintelligence could kill us all before the decade is out. Naturally, the industry’s response is essentially: “Yes, but what if we did it responsibly?”

There is some genuinely encouraging news: AI-generated drugs are showing intriguing early results in aging research. That’s exactly the sort of AI application the Geeks can get behind—as long as we’re talking about actual science and not an LLM confidently hallucinating a cure for everything.

The autonomous future isn’t looking much better. Tesla’s Cybercabs arrive in Austin and almost immediately attract federal scrutiny over their self-certification and conspicuous lack of steering wheels, pedals, mirrors, and apparently even conventional door handles. Bitcoin’s Liquid Network is relieved of roughly $320 million, after which the thieves return most of it and call the whole thing a “white hat” operation—because apparently robbing the bank and giving some of the money back now counts as a bug bounty.

On the surveillance front, Massachusetts police are being forced to disclose where their license-plate readers are and what data they collect, while the backlash against Flock cameras continues. Meanwhile, the UK’s attempt to protect children from online sexual abuse risks creating exactly the kind of universal scanning and surveillance infrastructure we’ve spent years warning about. Good intentions, meet spectacularly bad implementation.

And because we apparently haven’t suffered enough, Twitter is now Tweet.app. Star Trek turns sixty, and Paramount celebrates with cookware and a questionable episode. Silo gets a spinoff tease, Ted Lasso gives us a Christmas episode in September, and The Gentlemen returns with a season so good it makes reality TV feel like a traumatic brain injury. South Park becomes South America, Donnie Darko gets a 25th-anniversary 4K theatrical run, and several tech-industry documentaries promise varying degrees of psychological damage.

Plus, Netflix keeps stuffing games into your subscription; LaCroix, sorry, Le Creuset, wants to put Star Trek in your kitchen; and the Geeks debate books, Libby, time travel, and whether surviving Dungeon Crawler Carl is worth the emotional investment.

Welcome back to the future, where everything is automated, surveilled, self-driving, subscription-based and somehow still requires us to do all the damn work.

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