from The Guardian Here’s a story that evangelists for so-called AI (artificial intelligence) – or machine-learning (ML) – might prefer you didn’t dwell upon. It comes from the pages of Nature Machine Intelligence, as sober a journal as you could wish to find in a scholarly library. It stars four research scientists – Fabio Urbina, Filippa Lentzos, Cédric Invernizzi and Sean Ekins – who work for a pharmaceutical company building machine-learning systems for finding “new therapeutic inhibitors” – substances that interfere with a chemical reaction, growth or other biological activity involved in human diseases. The essence of pharmaceutical research is […]
Continue readingHow to Detect AI-Generated Text, According to Researchers
from Wired AI-GENERATED TEXT, FROM tools like ChatGPT, is starting to impact daily life. Teachers are testing it out as part of classroom lessons. Marketers are champing at the bit to replace their interns. Memers are going buck wild. Me? It would be a lie to say I’m not a little anxious about the robots coming for my writing gig. (ChatGPT, luckily, can’t hop on Zoom calls and conduct interviews just yet.) With generative AI tools now publicly accessible, you’ll likely encounter more synthetic content while surfing the web. Some instances might be benign, like an auto-generated BuzzFeed quiz about which deep-fried dessert matches your […]
Continue readingLove And Loathing In The Time Of ChatGPT
from 3 Quarks Daily Recently, I asked the students in my class whether they had used ChatGPT, the artificially intelligent chatbot recently loosed upon the world by OpenAI. My question was motivated by a vague thought that I might ask them to use the system as a whimsical diversion within an assignment. Somewhat to my surprise, every student had used the system. Perhaps I should not have been surprised given the volume of chatter about ChatGPT on my social media feeds and my own obsessive “playing” with it for some time after being introduced to it. There is clearly something […]
Continue readingCringeworthy in the Future
from The Technium The New York Times asked me (and others) to suggest some things our descendants might be embarrassed about in the future. Things we do now, that might make future generations cringe. Good question! My reply is this short list, which I may add to later as I think of them. Their full list was published here as Future Cringe on Jan 27, 2023. More here.
Continue readingProject Texas: The Details of TikTok’s Plan to Remain Operational in the United States
from Lawfare Since 2019, TikTok has been negotiating with the U.S. government to address concerns about potential national security risks posed by the platform. Failure to reach an agreement that satisfies the U.S. government’s concerns could have severe consequences for TikTok’s ability to continue operating in the United States: TikTok would likely be banned or required to sell off a majority stake in the company. In the past several months, rumors have swirled about what the contours of such an agreement might be and when it might be announced. While some details have emerged about Project Texas, the code name […]
Continue readingThe Global Carbon Surveillance State Is Coming
from NYTs For decades, those of us wondering why so little action had been taken to reduce carbon emissions, and why the public felt so little urgency about that failure, would sometimes lament that carbon dioxide was invisible. Unlike the pollution that smogged up cities, set rivers on fire and inspired the Clean Air and Water Acts here and similar legislation abroad, the stuff that was damaging the climate was being put into the atmosphere without anyone really seeing it. That’s why one of the most fascinating developments from this year’s major climate conference, COP27, which kicked off Nov. 6 […]
Continue reading60 Minutes: Social Media and Political Polarization in America
from Center for Humane Technology More here.
Continue readingThe Email Elon Musk Just Sent To Twitter Employees Is A Masterclass In How Not To Communicate
from Fast Company Elon Musk has made quite a first impression on his new employees. During his first few weeks as CEO of Twitter, he laid off some 3,700 workers. Since acquiring the company on October 27, Musk hadn’t formally spoken to the majority of staff who remain at Twitter. “Any sort of communication about anything would honestly just be the first step,” one Twitter employee working out of the company’s New York City office told me last week. “No one hears anything.” Today, Musk fixed that—sort of—but, in so doing, managed to send what some leadership experts describe as […]
Continue readingThe Coldhearted Carbon Math
from NYTs Last November in Glasgow, the annual United Nations climate conference ended with its president, Alok Sharma, declaring that the global goal of keeping warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius had been just barely kept alive. “Its pulse is weak,” he said. This week in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, delegates reconvened for COP27, this year’s conference, amid a flurry of confident assertions that the same goal — which has energized and mobilized a global generation of activists and provides the conventional standard for judging progress on emissions — was now dead. “Say goodbye to 1.5° C,” The Economist intoned on […]
Continue readingAlgorithms Quietly Run The City Of DC – And Maybe Your Hometown
from ars technica Washington, DC, is the home base of the most powerful government on earth. It’s also home to 690,000 people—and 29 obscure algorithms that shape their lives. City agencies use automation to screen housing applicants, predict criminal recidivism, identify food assistance fraud, determine if a high schooler is likely to drop out, inform sentencing decisions for young people, and many other things. That snapshot of semiautomated urban life comes from a new report from the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). The nonprofit spent 14 months investigating the city’s use of algorithms and found they were used across 20 […]
Continue readingDrought Conditions Drop the Mississippi River to Historic Lows
from The Atlantic Months of dry conditions in the Ohio River Valley and along the upper Mississippi basin have dropped the lower Mississippi River to levels that are approaching record lows. The narrowed channels and shallow water have affected barge traffic, making some docks inaccessible, slowing travel, and driving up the cost of freight. In some places, long-lost relics have been discovered, such as an old shipwreck on a riverbank in Louisiana, while in other places people have been able to explore features that are usually surrounded by water. More here.
Continue readingIran’s Internet Blackouts Are Part of a Global Menace
from Wired FOR THE PAST five weeks, thousands of Iranians, led by courageous young women, have taken to the streets of dozens of cities around the country, driven to action by the case of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman who died while in the custody of the country’s Morality Police. At tremendous risk to their safety, these young people are demanding an end to years of oppression, burning their hijabs, shearing their hair, and marching in solidarity as the protest anthem Baraye, with its chorus “for women, life, freedom,” echoes through the streets. Authorities have responded with a brutal […]
Continue readingThe Fallout From the First Trial of a Corporate Executive for ‘Covering Up’ a Data Breach
from Lawfare Uber’s former chief security officer (CSO), Joe Sullivan, was found guilty on Oct. 5 of obstruction of justice (18 U.S.C. § 1505) and misprision of a felony (18 U.S.C. § 4) based on what the Justice Department called his “attempted cover-up of a 2016 hack of Uber.” In 2016, while the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was investigating Uber for an earlier incident, Sullivan learned of another hacking incident that affected the Uber accounts of more than 57 million riders and drivers. In its prosecution of Sullivan, the government alleged that, rather than disclose the incident to the FTC, […]
Continue readingDecember Argument Session Will Feature Divisive Cases On Election Law, First Amendment
from SCOTUSblog The Supreme Court’s December argument session will feature two of the highest-profile cases of the 2022-23 term: a free-speech claim by a website designer who opposes same-sex marriage and a case involving the power of state legislatures to set rules for federal elections. That news came with the release of the court’s December argument calendar on Tuesday. The justices will hear argument in 303 Creative v. Elenis, the case brought by Colorado website designer Lorie Smith, on Dec. 5. Smith wants to expand her business to create custom wedding websites, but she opposes same-sex marriage on religious grounds […]
Continue readingAfter The Pandemic, Heavy Burdens For A Covid Generation
from WaPo Ask anyone who has experienced the lingering maladies of the pandemic, and they’ll tell you long covid is no figment of the imagination. Tiredness, breathlessness, body aches and “brain fog” hang around for millions of people. Some of these symptoms are also common without covid, and researchers are trying to pin down with precision the lasting damage this virus can do to the human body. They are far from a full understanding. That’s why a new study in Scotland is important. It was aimed at discovering the frequency, nature, determinants and impact of long covid on a large […]
Continue readingWhat Will AI Do To Branding?
from Fast Company A few months ago, when artificial-intelligence services that generated images based on text prompts started taking over the Internet, Heinz decided to test just how much its brand was synonymous with ketchup in general. Working with the agency Rethink, Heinz asked AI image-maker DALL-E 2 to render “ketchup” and variations with different aesthetic modifiers (“renaissance,” “impressionism,” “street art,” etc.). The results, though varied in style, were all unmistakably Heinz-centric—notably referencing the unique shape of the Heinz label. Apart from being a fun stunt, it was a mighty flex, demonstrating the power of the Heinz brand. More here.
Continue reading9 Astonishing Ways That Living Standards Have Improved Around The World
from Big Think Over the last 200 years, the lives of average people in every country have been radically transformed and improved. In our modern day, we are living longer and are more prosperous than ever before — in both high-income and low-income countries. And while progress forward is by no means progress completed nor a guarantee of progress to come, the remarkable improvements in global living standards serve, not as a high water or finish line, but rather as a source of inspiration and hope. More here.
Continue readingBoston Dynamics *Really* Does Not Want You To Add Weapons To Its Robots
from ars technica Boston Dynamics and several other robotics companies have pledged not to weaponize “general purpose robots” according to an open letter released publicly on Thursday and first reported by Axios. Although with sizable caveats in place, the letter focuses mostly on unauthorized public misuse of their products. In the letter, titled “General Purpose Robots Should Not Be Weaponized,” six companies (Agility Robotics, ANYbotics, Boston Dynamics, Clearpath Robotics, Open Robotics, and Unitree Robotics) spell out concerns about “risks of harm and serious ethical issues” from the weaponization of their general-purpose products, fearing that it will “harm public trust in the […]
Continue readingThe Tech Site That Took On China’s Surveillance State
from The Atlantic Behind Heights Market & Deli (“Home of the Hoagie”) and next to Finishers Mixed Martial Arts gym, in a neighborhood of tidy lawns adorned with reflective gazing balls, sits a mundane warehouse that is the headquarters of an obscure news organization with an equally mundane name: Internet Protocol Video Market. The nondescript location gives little clue about what kind of journalistic enterprise goes on here. IPVM’s office has no newsroom with reporters clacking on keyboards and TVs playing cable news. Instead, technicians run surveillance cameras and other security equipment through a litany of tests. Some journalist staff […]
Continue readingMeta Disrupted China-Based Propaganda Machine Before It Reached Many Americans
from ars technica China’s ability to influence American politics by manipulating social media platforms has been a topic of much scrutiny ahead of the midterm elections, and this week has marked some progress toward mitigating risks on some of the most popular US platforms. US President Joe Biden is currently working on a deal with China-based TikTok—often regarded as a significant threat to US national security—with the one goal of blocking potential propaganda or misinformation campaigns. Now today, Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, shared a report detailing the steps it took to remove the first “Chinese-origin influence operation” that […]
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