OpenAI's chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane thinks the 2028 presidential election could be a defining moment for AI. And he wants politicians to start developing policies that address Americans' concerns about the technology, rather than simply paying lip service to anti-AI sentiment and the backlash against data centers. In a new essay, Lehane compares AI's potential to reshape the economy to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, the 1930s set of federal programs and reforms enacted after industrialization and the Great Depression shattered the old economic order. He observes that Americans today feel similarly anxious about losing control over their economic futures and urges politicians to find a 'compelling third path' that allows people to share in AI's benefits. He lays out five policy priorities, spanning worker protections and education to AI safety and data center development. The essay comes on the heels of a stunning Democratic victory in the midterm elections, in which Democrats flipped control of Congress amid widespread voter frustration over the cost of living. Kate Brennan, who leads AI and corporate power policy at the AI Now Institute, told TechCrunch that Lehane's rhetoric marks a notable shift from OpenAI's policy agenda last year, which focused on accelerating AI development, reducing regulatory barriers, and expanding infrastructure....
On Tuesday, Apple rolled out a potentially controversial set of Audio Intelligence features into testing with the first developer beta versions of iOS 27.3 and watchOS 27.3. The betas bring four new AI features that allow Apple Watch Series 12 wearers to detect important sounds, identify songs, catch up on conversations, and take notes. After just a day with Apple's Siri Recaps feature on my Apple Watch, I can already see how its value may ultimately outweigh any creepiness factor that comes from the AI-powered audio recording and summarization it provides. However, I also see areas where AI-assisted note-taking can go too far, capturing things that aren't worth remembering, and where there's room for improvement. The first two, sound and song detection, don't represent potential privacy concerns; they are designed to detect either important sounds ' like an alarm or doorbell ' or identify a song using Shazam's technology. The former helps deaf and hard-of-hearing users navigate the world, and the latter is something we've already done with our iPhone for nearly two decades now....
Hear the biggest stories from the world of science | 4 November 2026...
To say that someone has 'good hands' is high praise in a molecular biology laboratory, where researchers must deftly handle delicate glassware, pipette samples and more. But in an unusual genetics lab at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, a team of robots driven by artificial intelligence is designing and doing experiments with no hands to speak of. The facility, described today1 in Nature, is one of the latest steps towards 'self-driving' labs that are guided by AI, with minimal input from human scientists. With samples moved around by robotic arms, the Shanghai lab can operate more than 20 types of instrument, complete thousands of operations in a single project and do experiments that involve synthesizing and sequencing DNA, among other tasks. An experiment is designed and executed from start to finish by a team of AI agents, following a simple prompt from a human operator. After that, human hands are needed only to refresh reagents and to service hardware. The system, called AutoDNA, is remarkable both for its degree of autonomy and because it can readily incorporate a diverse range of lab equipment, says Milad Abolhasani, a chemical engineer at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. 'The future of science is going to involve a lot of autonomous labs.'...
