I wish there were more human written articles posted here. The ending of this is so obviously an LLM being prompted to connect this news back to the site’s purpose. There just isn’t a link, so it makes something up.
I hope you and I never get the opportunity to learn how this would end. We’ve had nukes on Earth for less than 100 years, do you expect the next few thousand to go that well? Do you think in that time, nobody will ever roll a nat 1 on a wisdom check?
I think it’s possible that there’s a technical reason for monochrome cameras. For example, to let in the maximum amount of IR light for tracking. Bayer filters reduce the amount of light getting in, so it might help the IR LEDs be visible on surrounding walls in the dark.
I would assume that this was a carrier request/demand that got filtered down to some poor employee that had to implement it. There’s a linked bug, but the bug is restricted.
I don’t know if this was one of the intended outcomes, but this will probably cause some struggling college and universities to shut down.
International students raise quite a lot of money for higher-ed institutions because they pay full price without financial aid. The loss of that income is going to make a bad situation for higher-ed budgets much worse. Unless you are Harvard or Stanford (or a few other universities that are endowments with schools attached), you’re probably already in a budget crunch or eating into your endowment.
A side note, one of the founders of the college I went to has been convinced that higher-ed needs an entirely new business model in order to survive, and is founding a new school called Greenway (https://www.greenwayinstitute.org) that is trying to blend internships and co-op programs into an engineering education.