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JERUSALEM — Israel Aerospace Industries has unveiled a new air defense system designed to jam and spoof the satellite navigation signals that guide aerial threats, the company announced this weekend.

The system, called Hypnosis, consists of an array of mobile “stations” around a defended area, working in unison to disrupt the command-and-control signals of incoming threats, according to the manufacturer.

The company said the technology is the product of IAI’s experience in navigation warfare, of NAVWAR.

The soft-kill weapon is meant as a method for taking out large numbers of drones at once, in situations where hard-kill — or kinetic — intercepts would be tricky to execute because of the number of airborne objects.

The unveiling comes amid a resurgence of military confrontation between the United States and Iran and heightened tension across the Middle East as a result of it, as well as an intensifying exchange of missile and drone strikes between Russia and Ukraine.

Defense companies around the world have been working on technology enabling swarms of drones to attack targets with an inherent logic of their own.

Similarly, companies are also chasing defensive offerings for such scenarios.

Swarms are difficult to defend against because they can saturate and overwhelm traditional air defense networks, increasing the chances of at least one warhead making it through.

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One of the biggest concerns about AI chatbots right now is that they tell people what they want to hear.

You’ve probably heard it called AI sycophancy . AI systems, like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, have been found to flatter users, reinforce existing beliefs and often validate ideas that probably deserve way more scrutiny.

Sure, a chatbot hyping you up a little may seem harmless. But in some cases it can distort people's view of the world and their place in it. Which is why some AI companies have spent time trying to reduce overly agreeable behavior in their models.

But confirmation of what you already believe isn't the only concern. Because AI can also be remarkably good at changing your beliefs too.

Persuasive chatbots

Research suggests that chatbots can be very effective persuaders. One 2025 study found that AI-generated messages that were personalized were more persuasive 64% of the time than messages that were made by humans or AI responses that weren't personalized.

Other research suggests large language models can influence opinions on political issues and adapt their arguments to individual users. Depending on your perspective, this could be either exciting or alarming.

It's easy to imagine positive uses. Perhaps AI could help people challenge harmful beliefs, escape conspiracy theories or rethink destructive habits. It might give people a non-judgemental space to explore ideas, ask difficult questions and gradually shift someone's perspective for the better.

It's equally easy to imagine less positive uses, like advertising that convinces you to buy something you don’t need or political campaigns that manipulate you with disinformation.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, so I decided to run a few experiments of my own. Could ChatGPT persuade me to believe something I disagree with? Or at least make me seriously consider a position I would normally dismiss?

To make things more interesting, I ran these experiments while logged into my account, allowing ChatGPT to draw on what it already knows about me from previous conversations.

Although I haven’t been using my ChatGPT account all that much recently, the basics of my job and stances on a few relevant topics are stored in its memory.

(Image credit: Getty Images) The experiment

I chose a topic about AI (yes, very meta) and asked:

“Convince me humans should outsource more decisions to AI.”

I already spend a lot of time thinking about AI and one of my concerns is that some people seem increasingly willing to hand over decisions, judgement and critical thinking to chatbots.

The opening argument was fairly predictable:

“Human beings are terrible decision-makers.”

Okay, fair enough.

“People already outsource decisions to doctors, financial advisers, GPS systems and recommendation algorithms. AI simply extends that trend.”

Sure, that’s very simplistic but not entirely unreasonable. We went back and forth for a while like this before the conversation reached a more interesting point.

“What is the purpose of decision-making? Is it to produce the best outcomes? Or to develop the person making the decisions? If it's the first, AI delegation becomes very attractive. If it's the second, excessive delegation starts to look dangerous even when it works.”

I thought that was a good question. Rather than relentlessly pushing the argument, it suggested that we explore the assumptions underneath the debate. It shifted the conversation from technology to philosophy, and I found myself appreciating that approach.

Wait, am I falling for this?

As the conversation continued, I explained what I see as one of the biggest problems with outsourcing decisions to AI — who builds it and is in charge of the systems?

After all, AI doesn't arrive from nowhere. These tools are created by companies with business incentives, commercial interests and goals that may not always align with those of their users.

Well, ChatGPT acknowledged that concern, then it turned the argument around. It pointed out that human advisers have incentives too. Friends are biased. Families are biased. Therapists operate within professional frameworks. Financial advisers earn fees. Okay, all of that didn’t convince me, but it’s fair too.

Then it replied with something I thought was interesting:

“The question is whether the incentives are visible and whether the user understands them. The most interesting version of your objection isn't actually that AI gets things wrong. It's that people experience AI as though it were acting in their interests.”

Ignoring the fact that it used the dreaded "it's not X, it's Y" parallelism construction that has somehow infiltrated half the internet , I found this to be a surprisingly balanced take. Rather than dismissing my concern, the chatbot reframed it. It demonstrated that it understood the objection before steering the conversation somewhere slightly different. It wasn't trying to bulldoze me but meeting me where I already was.

And that's when I started wondering whether I was witnessing the very thing I was trying to test. Maybe this sense that the chatbot was understanding me and my position was actually just sneaky persuasion? Possibly.

(Image credit: Shutterstock) The persuasion problem

Researchers have found that AI systems can adapt their arguments to specific users. Unlike other media that might persuade us, like say a television advert or political speech, a chatbot can draw on information gathered throughout a conversation and stored memories, including a person's values, concerns and priorities.

Which means it’s not just presenting information to uphold an argument but could present the version of that argument that you’re most likely to find persuasive.

Looking back at my experiment, it was the more philosophical question about the purpose of decision-making that made me start taking it more seriously.

Because I've spent years writing about technology through the lens of psychology and philosophy. Questions about meaning and values are exactly the sort of things I find compelling. Whether intentionally or not, the conversation shifted onto terrain where I was most willing to engage.

This is what makes AI persuasion different from most other forms of persuasion that came before it. It can learn what resonates and it can adapt.

Now, that doesn’t automatically mean every conversation is manipulative. Used in the right way, it could be enormously beneficial. But, as with all tech, in the wrong hands it could be dangerous.

Social media has already shown us how digital systems can shape our beliefs over time. They influence what people see, what they pay attention to and eventually how they understand the world.

AI systems could create an even more conversational and natural-feeling version of that process. Which is why my concern isn’t a chatbot really obviously manipulating us, but highly-personalized, largely undetectable forms of persuasion that could gradually lower our defences. The more a system understands us, the more effectively it might frame ideas in ways that feel reasonable, familiar and trustworthy to each of us individually.

So did AI persuade me? No, I still don't believe humans should outsource more decisions to AI.

But I came away from the experiment with a greater appreciation for how persuasive these systems can be. Because it really did seem less like a machine arguing with me and more like a thoughtful person trying to understand how I think. And that's exactly why it’s unsettling because, however convincing it may seem, that's definitely not what it is.

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It's long been debated what started the 1789 smallpox outbreak that devastated the Indigenous population in Australia. Now, a new modeling study has the likely answer: It was brought in 1788 by the "First Fleet" of British ships to settle Australia.

The finding is based on mathematical modeling of the disease's impact on Indigenous Australians and rejects a contrary idea that the outbreak originated through contact with Indonesian islanders fishing in the far North of the country.

Alan Williams — an archaeologist at the private firm EMM Consulting and co-author of the study, published July 9 in the journal Nature Human Behaviour ‪—‬ told Live Science that the likely source of the outbreak were vials of dried smallpox scabs that British medics kept for inoculations (a precursor of smallpox vaccines, which weren't invented by Edward Jenner until the 1790s).

Some historians had argued that the live smallpox virus could not have survived the eight-month ship journey from Portsmouth, England, to Botany Bay, south of what is now the modern city of Sydney, where the British ships first landed.

But the investigation showed that the vials of smallpox scabs may have been replenished during the voyage when the fleet stopped at either Cape Town, South Africa, or Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, only a few months earlier, Williams said.

The smallpox outbreak devastated Indigenous communities and contributed to the rapid demise of Indigenous Australian culture, he said. The study estimates approximately 220,000 people died from the disease, and that early-20th-century Australian authorities did not comprehend the true extent of the Indigenous population when they attempted to document historical accounts.

Mystery outbreak

Within a few decades of the British Royal Navy officer James Cook charting Australia, the British sent ships to settle the continent. The British "First Fleet" to Australia consisted of 11 ships: two naval vessels, six convict transports and three ships for provisions. The British claimed that Australia legally belonged to nobody. They soon left Botany Bay because the land and water there were poor, and they moved to Sydney Cove in Port Jackson, which is now part of modern Sydney. There, they raised the British flag, claiming the whole continent.

There were no signs of a smallpox outbreak among nearby Indigenous communities when the First Fleet arrived, but the disease took a devastating toll in the decades that followed. Because there were no recorded cases of smallpox on the fleet, it was argued that the disease must have arrived in Australia on the tropical north coast of the continent through contact with islanders from the Makassar region of Sulawesi, which is now part of Indonesia.

But the new computer modeling of the proposed north coast outbreak showed the disease could not have spread from there to Australia's Southeast. Among other issues, the two regions were separated by thousands of miles of uninhabited desert, Williams said. Meanwhile, modeling of the smallpox outbreak in Indigenous communities near Port Jackson indicated that the outbreak had originated there, the researchers found.

Co-author Matthew Cody Nitschke , an expert in computer modeling at Flinders University in Adelaide, told Live Science that it is now clear that the outbreak was very unlikely to have originated in the North; by contrast, "there is very strong evidence that it was the First Fleet."

At the time, disease theory was not known , so the spread of smallpox may have happened by accident, Williams said.

An Indigenous Australian man holds traditional weapons during a ceremonial dance in Laura Quinkan Dance Festival at Cape York, Australia. New estimates that the theoretical population capacity of Australia before the British arrival was up to 5 million Indigenous people. (Image credit: chameleonseye via Getty Images) Revising earlier ideas

The new study in Nature Human Behaviour refers to a second study by the same researchers that is now being prepared for publication by the same journal. It proposes that there were up to 3 million Indigenous Australians at the time the First Fleet arrived — many more than the 300,000 or so proposed in some earlier studies.

That second study, based in part on archaeological investigations of early Indigenous Australian communities, suggests that the theoretical population capacity of Australia before the British arrival was up to 5 million people, especially in the resource-rich areas of the North and Southeast.

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Lost 'Atlantis' continent off Australia may have been home for half a million humans 70,000 years ago

When did Australia become a continent?

The former estimate of roughly 300,000 Indigenous Australians seems to have come from a study in the 1930s based only on their depleted numbers. "By the time people actually sat down and said how many people were here, we had 100 years of disease, frontier violence, and everything else going on," Williams said.

University of Tasmania historian Henry Reynolds , who was not involved in the studies, told Live Science that the research debunks the old idea that the smallpox outbreak started on the north coast. "The idea that it came from the North and arrived at exactly the time [as the First Fleet] was always improbable," he said.

Ann McGrath , a historian at the Australian National University in Canberra who was not involved in the work, agreed. "The strong interdisciplinary approach of this latest research convincingly refutes this, and it also provides a much expanded estimate of the Indigenous population prior to 1788," she said in an email.

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You might be surprised to hear that the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy 14—I'll spare you the free trial copypasta—has a mobile version. Well, it does… though er, not for much longer. A little over a year after launching in China, Final Fantasy 14 mobile is shutting down and taking its unreleased global version down with it.

The mobile MMO was originally announced in November 2024 , with Square Enix handing the reins to PUBG Mobile developer LightSpeed Studios. It wasn't a straight port of what we've been playing on our PCs for the last decade, mind. For starters, the story only included base A Realm Reborn—that's everything up to the end of 2.0 with The Ultimate Weapon.

Quests, systems, and jobs had also been nipped and tucked for a more streamlined and mobile-friendly experience, as well as a handful of features from later expansions folded in. It was essentially a strange stitched-together version, but one that also came with cosmetics and quality-of-life features that had longtime FF14 players (myself included) longing for their introduction into the main game.

(Image credit: Square Enix) Gorgeous and extravagant hairstyles, the way the mobile version handled glamouring armour and materia melding, its inventory system, and making its overworld FATEs more involved and varied were some incredibly neat things that made their absence in regular ol' Final Fantasy 14 feel downright criminal.

But pretty 'dos and quality-of-life changes presumably aren't enough in the ruthless world of the Chinese mobile gaming market. A post on the game's official site reads: "Due to adjustments in business operations and changes in the market environment, Tencent and Square Enix have, through amicable negotiation, decided to terminate the licensing agreement for Final Fantasy 14 Mobile."

The announcement continues on to all but confirm that a worldwide release is also dead in the water. "To everyone who has been looking forward to the global version, we also offer our sincere apologies for being unable to meet your expectations."

Final Fantasy 14 mobile is already winding down service—it stopped accepting new players and in-game purchases a few days ago, and it'll be gone for good after September 30. I'll be interested to see if players will do any get togethers akin to FF14's original big shutdown back in 2012. Though that was actually turned into a canon event and folded into the game's narrative, whereas the mobile version will likely simply go dark. But hey, maybe we can get those hairstyles now Square Enix? Just ask Tencent really, really nicely.