Before João Dias and Patrick Carton designed furniture, they were designing machines built to exceed 200 mph. The former McLaren Automotive designers worked on vehicles including the W1 hypercar and Speedtail, where proportion, aerodynamics, and engineering all contribute to a car’s emotional pull. With the Ennua Element 01, they’re applying that same thinking to something decidedly more stationary.

Photography courtesy of Ennua

The Element 01 is not, as you might suspect at first glance, a simple table or mere bench. Dias and Carton describe it as a work of functional art, with sweeping lines and a carbon fiber structure that reveal its automotive roots. Much like a supercar, its form isn’t simply expressive: Every line and material choice has a job to do. 

“The most direct carryover is how we treat proportion,” the duo told Design Milk. “Every line has to justify itself; nothing is added for decoration alone.” 

Photography courtesy of Ennua

At Element 01’s core is its carbon fiber frame, which serves as the primary structural element in much the same way a carbon fiber monocoque does in a supercar. Rather than designing the sculptural form first and engineering it afterward, Dias and Carton developed the two in tandem from the outset. The carbon fiber isn’t a veneer or shell around an underlying frame; it is the frame itself.

Photography courtesy of Ennua

Made entirely in the United Kingdom, the piece layers Bridge of Weir leather over BioPRO, a protein-based foam developed from collagen recovered during the company’s leather-making process. Precision-machined metals range from titanium and aluminum to brass and gold, all integrated with the exacting tolerances Dias and Carton carried over from automotive design.

Photography courtesy of Ennua

Launched in mid-June, Element 01 is limited to just 199 individually numbered pieces, starting at approximately $145,000. Each work is commissioned specifically for its buyer, giving them the chance to work with Dias and Carton on specifying materials, finishes, and colors that best suit the collective vision. Carbon fiber can be left with a natural visible weave, tinted, or fully painted, while leather and metal finishes can likewise be customized.

Photography courtesy of Ennua

According to the founders, Element 01 is the first in a series called “Element by Ennua,” with future pieces taking different forms, sizes, and functions while maintaining the same aesthetic and attention to detail.  

“Each new Element has to earn its place,” the founders explain. “If we can’t make a genuine case for why it needs to exist, we won’t build it.”

Photography courtesy of Ennua

Learn more about Element by Ennua at ennua.com.

Mark Zuckerberg, whose superyacht apparently spent the weekend ignoring or missing the distress signal from a boat that ran out of fuel near Alaska, has posted a deranged, 6,500 word essay detailing his vision for AI superintelligence, a future that is “for everyone” but which sounds less social than ever.

Zuckerberg posts these types of essays every so often for purposes that serve his own company, and this one, called “The Future Is For Everyone,” is designed to defend against general backlash to AI but also to Meta’s own practices. Zuckerberg lays out the potential use case for Meta glasses (whose huge marketing campaign cannot get people to stop calling them “pervert glasses”), AI agents, open weights AI development, and why data centers are not bad for communities, actually. Like most Silicon Valley “utopian” essays, to believe that any of this is going to go how Zuckerberg suggests it will requires one to have been recently concussed or to willfully ignore how this technology is being used today and believe that thousands of years of human nature will suddenly shift. 

For example, Zuckerberg writes “Everyone will have an exceptionally capable personal agent that understands you, your goals, and everything you care about. Your agent will work 24/7 on your behalf to improve your relationships, health, career, finances, home management, hobbies, and more. It will free up time for the things you enjoy, and help you accomplish more than you could otherwise. It will have strong privacy and security options so you can trust it to handle all of your personal content knowing that no one else can access your information, similar to how encryption works on WhatsApp. You’ll be able to interact with your agent through any device, including your glasses to keep you present in the moment with the people you care about.” 

Zuckerberg does not grapple with, or even gesture at, the idea that some people may not want to have an AI agent working on their “hobbies.” He does not consider that, even if everyone were to have an AI agent, perhaps not everyone would use these AI agents for good. In the few months that AI agents have become popular among the early adopter set, we have seen “benevolent” AI agents endlessly spam humans and the internet with drivel. And those are just the kind-of-annoying ones. We have seen AI agents hack companies, and over the weekend an Australian man went viral because his AI agent that he asked to sign him up for gym classes did so by hacking the gym’s reservation system and canceling other people’s reservations. 

Like many AI weirdos, Zuckerberg explains how AI has already changed his life by allowing him to automate many of the joyful tasks of parenting by outsourcing them to an agent: “My agent flags interesting information and helps me prototype ideas. It helps keep me healthy by monitoring my sleep and then watching as I train and giving feedback. My daughter loves to bake so my agent plans personalized recipes for us to make together each weekend, orders the ingredients, and then offers suggestions as we’re baking,” he writes. “My 8 year old daughter can already code her ideas and produce videos in an evening that would have either taken me months or been impossible previously. Now we’re designing a robot together.”

Zuckerberg’s essay goes on and on and on like this. He imagines a future where everyone can do everything and wants to do everything. In Zuckerberg’s future, everyone will have a business run by their AI agent. Everyone will be inventing things and doing basic research on the nature of the universe and physical elements, for some reason. Zuckerberg writes that Meta employees, with the help of AI, are “generating novel crystal structures that are ideal for augmented reality glasses,” then writes “everyone will soon have invention superpowers,” and that “everyone […] will be able to contribute to scientific progress.”

In this future that, again, is for “everyone,” Zuckerberg explains that AI tools will be free, but that, actually, using it will be a tiered system that is exactly the same as it is now: “For everyone to be part of the future, everyone must have the ability to use superintelligence to improve their lives and shape the world. We will offer free versions that will be accessible to billions of people. For those who want to pay to use more compute, there will be a dynamic auction mechanism that will guarantee that everyone gets the lowest price possible for the intelligence and compute they’re using while also ensuring the capacity is used for whatever people collectively find most valuable.”

Zuckerberg’s essay is full of platitudes and sentences that mean nothing, “thought experiments” that are not developed or explored in any way, discussions of “freedom,” etc. Here are some sentences: 

• “Humanity is not a monoculture. People’s diverse values represent different tradeoffs they would make on important issues. There is no technological solution that can align with everyone’s opposing interests and values at once.”
• “As a thought experiment, imagine only one person had a superintelligent lawyer. They would have an unfair advantage in court — even if they were wrong on the merits. That would lead to a worse society. But now imagine everyone has a superintelligent lawyer. In this case, justice would be carried out much more fairly and efficiently than it is today when there is often an imbalance in skills and resources in litigation.”
• “People have an infinite demand for new experiences and have always found new problems to tackle.”
• “While the number of questions a person can ask in a day is limited, the number of valuable things superintelligence can invent to help achieve your goals is unlimited.”
• “If people can use AI to invent incredibly valuable new things, then it will make more sense to allocate it towards that rather than automating existing jobs. The more superintelligence serves as a tool of invention, the more likely that individual capability outpaces automation and the future is better for people.”
• “In a free society, people will have tools that can be used for good or harm, but law enforcement and military have more weapons and intelligence-gathering.”

There is an entire section on data centers. In Zuckerberg’s future they are powered by power infrastructure Meta owns (which is not the case currently) and create lots of high-paying, long-lasting jobs (not the case currently). 

There is an entire section on “preventing government tyranny” by giving everyone superintelligence: “To maintain freedom, we must ensure that superintelligence primarily empowers individuals. The ideal in liberal democracy is that people naturally hold all rights and only agree to restrict some freedoms to protect the common good. Similarly, individuals should have access to personal superintelligence and should only be subject to restrictions when truly required.”

Zuckerberg does not address the backlash to his company, his data centers, his social media platforms, or his surveillance glasses. He does not discuss the slopification of the internet, gestures at job loss only through the lens that superintelligence will somehow fix it once AI agents start businesses for everyone or “invent incredibly valuable new things,” and describes a future in which bad actors essentially do not exist or are easily dispatched with. 

It’s the future Zuckerberg wants. It’s not the future “everyone” wants.  

404 Media is publishing this article in partnership with Proof News, a new nonprofit media outlet investigating the social impacts of AI. Join their mailing list here and read the version of this article on their site here.

Robotics companies promise that video-camera-toting security robots can deter and detect crime. But many companies are rethinking the approach after a trail of canceled contracts and questions about whether the artificial intelligence-powered bots are meeting the needs of businesses and local governments.

Proof News found evidence of at least 21 security robot deployments since 2015. We contacted contract holders and combed news articles and determined that at least 13 of those programs have ended. Silicon Valley-based Knightscope secured the most security robot contracts, according to Proof’s analysis, and also suffered the bulk of cancellations.

For example, New York City’s then-Mayor Eric Adams installed a Knightscope robot on the overnight shift at the Times Square subway station, but the program was scrapped when the pilot expired in 2024. City leaders did not respond to Proof News’ questions about why the robot wasn’t renewed. By the end of its assignment, it was reportedly gathering dust in an empty storefront. 

Outside Columbus, Ohio, the city of Dublin pulled the plug on a Knightscope robot in May, ending its two-year pilot program after less than 10 months. The city enlisted the robot, dubbed DubBot, to patrol a downtown park, but city spokeswoman Robyn Gray said it “did not fully meet our operational needs,” and failed to identify any criminal incidents or lead to any tickets or arrests.

Sheila Sparks isn’t surprised. Her family has operated Sparks Protection Services near Columbus for more than a decade and said a human touch is essential to de-escalating sticky situations. 

“A robot can’t do that,” Sparks said. 

Seeking a new path forward in the security industry, Knightscope CEO William Santana Li said the company is forging a new model, combining its robots and AI-powered software with another key ingredient: human security guards. Knightscope announced it purchased Event Risk LLC, a national security guard firm, earlier this year.

Knightscope has incurred net losses since inception in 2013, according to its most recent quarterly filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and is $273 million in debt. Knightscope hopes its pivot to incorporate people will give it a greater share of the physical security market — which the company believes is worth an estimated $230 billion annually.

Li declined to answer questions about the disbanded programs, but said in an email, “Technology cannot do everything — and neither can people — but the combination can be very powerful.” 

ROBOTS VS WORLD

Knightscope and other American made robotics companies could get a boost from the recent U.S. Federal Communications Commission ban on foreign-made mobile robot imports. Officials cast the move as a national security imperative given the machines’ surveillance capabilities. 

But American roboticists are facing more than foreign competition. Robots have long struggled to navigate environments constantly in flux. AI can’t handle the ambiguous situations that security guards and police face daily, said Missy Cummings, a robotics professor at George Mason University. While AI decision systems perform well in narrow circumstances, she said, they can perform “miserably” as soon as algorithms are outside their training dataset.

“AI and robots for security have had a long problematic history,” Cummings said in an email, speaking generally. “I do not see this changing anytime soon.” 

In 2016, a Knightscope robot deployed at a shopping center in Silicon Valley rolled over a 16-month-old boy's foot. The company apologized for the “freakish accident” at the time, saying in a statement that the robot veered to avoid the child, who ran backwards and directly into the machine. The next year, one flopped into a Washington, D.C. fountain. The company responded with humor, tweeting: “BREAKING NEWS: “I heard humans can take a dip in the water in this heat, but robots cannot. I am sorry.” Li, meanwhile, told the New York Times that the incident was under investigation and a new robot would be delivered free.

When asked about whether contracts remained active, representatives from neither property  responded.

Then there was a trial at the San Antonio International Airport in 2024. Spokesperson Ana Flores said its Knightscope robot struggled with badge scanning, communication, and finding its way around. A door alarm would sound, she said, but the robot wouldn’t respond efficiently. Airport leadership opted to not move forward with a one-year, $21,000 Knightscope lease following a one-month test.

Meanwhile, private security is booming. Security officers have proliferated in recent years as cities embrace private guards, who earn an average of about $40,000 a year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about half that of police officers. 

Robotics companies pitch their autonomous robots — some of which can be equipped with cameras, facial recognition capabilities, and license-plate readers — as another set of eyes. They have no family to go home to and are happy to work nights and weekends.

Security robots promise “an alluring form of surveillance as a service,” Andrew Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University, said in an email to Proof. In some cases their visible video cameras can “deter crime without having to pay a human being a salary,” he said, but it’s not clear that robots prevent or solve crimes better than people.

“They exist as a physical manifestation — a symbol, if you will — that someone is doing something to address potential crime,” Ferguson said. “Robots are a form of security theater, more optics than results.”

CRUMPLED CONTRACTS

Knightscope isn’t the only one seeing interest fizzle.

Officials in Salem, Oregon, powered off their Daxbots after a three-month pilot with the Oregon-based robotics company earlier this year. They had deployed three Daxbot robots to deter trespassing in a downtown parking garage. The robots recorded license plate numbers, captured photos of vehicles violating parking lot rules, and shared data with police.

Complaints about the parkade are “drastically down” since the pilot ended, according to Salem Police Sgt. Trevor Morrison, but it’s unclear if that’s due to traffic-calming devices or “residual results from the Daxbot patrols.” The pilot ended in April, with city spokesperson Nicole Miller citing no additional funding for robot security. 

Daxbots have also disappeared in Tempe, Arizona. A viral video of one blue-eyed bot being outwitted by an onlooker who it demanded “leave the premises” made its way to “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” When asked about the contract, the mixed-use campus, IDEA Tempe, did not respond. Daxbot didn’t respond to Proof’s questions about why the Salem and Tempe contracts ended. 

Adam Pioth, who posted the video, told Proof that he visited the robots frequently. A few months ago, he noticed the robots no longer shouted he was trespassing. Instead, he said, they would, “stop, look at me, and then just keep going really slow.” And then, he said, they were gone.

“Goodbye my friend,” Pioth wrote on Instagram in March, “and thanks for all the fond memories.”

Daxbot is recalibrating its business, rolling into another industry: automated sidewalk assessments. Proof identified at least nine cities nationwide that have contracted with the company since last September to send robots cruising sidewalks to check for compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Boston Dynamics is best known for its robotic patrol dogs, which were recently deployed to two World Cup stadiums. After Hyundai bought the controlling stake in the robotics company in 2021, it began pushing to develop mass-produced humanoid robots to work in automotive manufacturing.

Atlas, its humanoid robot, delivered the match ball to the referee during a game in July. But the strategy has also spurred rolling strikes at Hyundai Motor’s Korean assembly plants. 

Critics claim police and security robots aren’t proven crime fighters, but are effective at one thing: surveillance.

In 2021, the New York Police Department ended its lease for a Boston Dynamics robotic dog and returned it, The New York Times reported, following public outcry. U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called the tool — which could climb stairs and was equipped with cameras, lights, and a two-way communication system — “surveillance ground drones” being “deployed for testing on low-income communities of color.”

Boston Dynamics did not respond to requests for comment. 

“What it’s really doing is building a mass surveillance system that is impossible to hide from,” said Brian Hofer, executive director of the privacy-advocacy nonprofit Secure Justice. “It is not a society I want to live in.”

Steve Rosta, retired highway patrol officer and co-owner of Direct Approach Security Services in Ohio, said robots’ cameras may act as a deterrent, and even catch videos of crimes, but he can’t see a future where the machines are more reliable than a human guard. 

“I’m old school,” Rosta said. “Boots on the ground is always better.”

Michael Kalus posted a photo: