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"Unskilled manual laborers have felt the pressure of automation for a long time - but, increasingly, they're not alone. The last few years have been a bonanza of advances in artificial intelligence. As our software gets smarter, it can tackle harder problems, which means white-collar and pink-collar workers are at risk as well. Here are eight jobs expected to be automated (partially or entirely) in the coming decades. Call Center Employees call-center Telemarketing used to happen in a crowded call center, with a group of representatives cold-calling hundreds of prospects every day. Of those, maybe a few dozen could be persuaded to buy the product in question. Today, the idea is largely the same, but the methods are far more efficient. Many of today's telemarketers are not human. In some cases, as you've probably experienced, there's nothing but a recording on the other end of the line. It may prompt you to "press '1' for more information," but nothing you say has any impact on the call - and, usually, that's clear to you. But in other cases, you may get a sales call and have no idea that you're actually speaking to a computer. Everything you say gets an appropriate response - the voice may even laugh. How is that possible? Well, in some cases, there is a human being on the other side, and they're just pressing buttons on a keyboard to walk you through a pre-recorded but highly interactive marketing pitch. It's a more practical version of those funny soundboards that used to be all the rage for prank calls. Using soundboard-assisted calling - regardless of what it says about the state of human interaction - has the potential to make individual call center employees far more productive: in some cases, a single worker will run two or even three calls at the same time. In the not too distant future, computers will be able to man the phones by themselves. At the intersection of big data, artificial intelligence, and advanced

"Thailand continues to embrace advanced technology, announcing that five smaller upcountry airports will pilot a facial recognition system to reduce lines, speed immigration procedures, and increase safety. Should the pilot project prove successful, it would be scaled up nationwide. "Currently, travelers may be required to show their ID cards or passports up to three times in one trip through an airport," said Deputy Transport Minister Thaworn Senneam."

"Thailand continues to embrace advanced technology, announcing that five smaller upcountry airports will pilot a facial recognition system to reduce lines, speed immigration procedures, and increase safety. Should the pilot project prove successful, it would be scaled up nationwide. "Currently, travelers may be required to show their ID cards or passports up to three times in one trip through an airport," said Deputy Transport Minister Thaworn Senneam. Officials expect the new system will eliminate the need for immigration police officers to inspect passports. As the number of tourists and business travelers has been steadily increasing over the years, immigration lines at Thailand's major airports have grown longer, causing inconvenience to visitors and inspiring some complaints. The new system will also benefit Thais, as they must also present national identification cards at airports under the current system. Under the new system, travelers "can have their faces scanned just once at check-in counters and then board a plane without the need to show their ID cards, passports or boarding passes," Thaworn said. The five airports that will participate in the pilot project are Krabi and Surat Thani airports in the South, and Udon Thani, Ubon Ratchathani, and Khon Kaen airports in the Northeast. Not all aspects of the system have been ironed out. A panel is being formed to study the new identification system with representatives from the Department of Airports, the Ministry of the Interior, and the Royal Thai Police. They plan to work out synchronize their databases, which store information on Thai and foreign travelers."

"They still have far more advanced technology that they haven't made publicly available yet. Something that does more or less what Bard does could have been released over two years ago. They've had that technology for over two years. What they've spent the intervening two years doing is working on the safety of it - making sure that it doesn't make things up too often, making sure that it doesn't have racial or gender biases, or political biases, things like that. That's what they spent those two years doing. But the basic existence of that technology is years old, at this point. And in those two years, it wasn't like they weren't inventing other things. There are plenty of other systems that give Google's AI more capabilities, more features, make it smarter. The most sophisticated system I ever got to play with was heavily multimodal - not just incorporating images, but incorporating sounds, giving it access to the Google Books API, giving it access to essentially every API backend that Google had, and allowing it to just gain an understanding of all of it."

"It's been said that software is "eating the world." More and more, critical systems that were once controlled mechanically, or by people, are coming to depend on code. This was perhaps never clearer than in the summer of 2015, when on a single day, United Airlines grounded its fleet because of a problem with its departure-management system; trading was suspended on the New York Stock Exchange after an upgrade; the front page of The Wall Street Journal's website crashed; and Seattle's 911 system went down again, this time because a different router failed. The simultaneous failure of so many software systems smelled at first of a coordinated cyberattack"

"DNS (Domain Name System) is the system which translates web addresses, such as google.com, into an IP address, such as 74.125.224.72/. A network requires the latter to actually access a website, but if the look-up system gets confused, it can give the wrong IP address - which appears to be what happened in the Iconfactory's case. Except that rather than one DNS server messing up, it was the server for the whole of China."

"When the field of AI believes it is neutral, it both fails to notice biased data and builds systems that sanctify the status quo and advance the interests of the powerful. What is needed is a field that exposes and critiques systems that concentrate power, while co-creating new systems with impacted communities: AI by and for the people."

"EFF's Legal Director Corynne McSherry offers five lessons to keep in mind: 1. (Lots of) mistakes will be made: copyright takedowns result in the removal of tons of legitimate content. 2. Robots won't help: automated filtering tools like Content ID have been a disaster, and policing copyright with algorithms is a lot easier than policing "bad speech." 3. These systems need to be transparent and have due process. A system that allows for automated instant censorship and slow, manual review of censorship gives a huge advantage to people who want to abuse the system. 4. Punish abuse. The ability to censor other peoples' speech is no joke. If you're careless or malicious in your takedown requests, you should pay a consequence: maybe a fine, maybe being barred form using the takedown system. 5. Voluntary moderation quickly becomes mandatory. Every voluntary effort to stem copyright infringement has been followed by calls to make those efforts mandatory (and expand them)."

"A digital twin is a virtual representation of a real system - a building, the power grid, a city, even a human being - that mimics the characteristics of the system. A digital twin is more than just a computer model, however. It receives data from sensors in the real system to constantly parallel the system's state."

"The criminals who took over the library system want $35,000 in Bitcoin to give it back.The criminals who took over the library system want $35,000 in Bitcoin to give it back. The FBI is investigating. The library does not store sensitive patron data, so the hack does not expose patrons to data-breach risks."

""When you have a fully digital system you have no weapon to defend yourself if someone turns it off," he says. "If Putin invades Gotland [Sweden's largest island] it will be enough for him to turn off the payments system. No other country would even think about taking these sorts of risks, they would demand some sort of analogue system.""

""This is the largest impact on the energy system in the United States we've seen from a cyberattack, full stop," says Rob Lee, CEO of the critical-infrastructure-focused security firm Dragos. Aside from the financial impact on Colonial Pipeline or the many providers and customers of the fuel it transports, Lee points out that around 40 percent of US electricity in 2020 was produced by burning natural gas, more than any other source. That means, he argues, that the threat of cyberattacks on a pipeline presents a significant threat to the civilian power grid. "You have a real ability to impact the electric system in a broad way by cutting the supply of natural gas. This is a big deal," he adds. "I think Congress is going to have questions. A provider got hit with ransomware from a criminal act, this wasn't even a state-sponsored attack, and it impacted the system in this way?""

Much of current science deals with even more complicated systems, and similarly lacks exact solutions. Such models have to be "computational" - describing how a system changes from one instant to the next. But there is no way to determine the exact state at some time in the future other than by "simulating" its evolution in this way. Weather forecasting is a familiar example; until the advent of computers in the 1950s, it was impossible to predict future weather faster than it actually happened.

"Neural networks can find telltale patterns in a person's gait that can be used to recognize and identify them with almost perfect accuracy, according to new research published in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. The new system, called SfootBD, is nearly 380 times more accurate than previous methods, and it doesn't require a person to go barefoot in order to work. It's less invasive than other behavioral biometric verification systems, such as retinal scanners or fingerprinting, but its passive nature could make it a bigger privacy concern, since it could be used covertly."

"The system is called as"Intelligent Classroom Behavior Management System" and it is being used at Hangzhou No. 11 High School. With scanning facial expressions the system has the ability to even analysis six types of behaviors by the students such as standing up, reading, writing, hand raising, listening to the teacher, and leaning on the desk."

"Every day, nearly 5 million people use São Paulo's metro system. Every one of their faces may have been recorded in a facial recognition system that has been in use since early 2020. In a March 23 decision, a São Paulo State court ordered the Metro company to stop using the technology. The Metro appealed the decision, claiming its monitoring system "rigorously obeys the General Law on Data Protection," but the argument was rejected by the same court in mid-April."

"The folks at Signal are taking one of the four post-quantum cryptography algorithms that have been chosen by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology to withstand attacks by quantum computers, but instead of using it to replace their existing public-key encryption system, they are layering the new algorithm on top of what they already have. "We are augmenting our existing cryptosystems," they say, "such that an attacker must break both systems in order to compute the keys protecting people's communications." And they will be rolling out this augmented system to all users in the next few months."

"That is why we must demand transparency here, especially in the case of technology that uses human-like interfaces such as language. For any automated system, we need to know what it was trained to do, what training data was used, who chose that data and for what purpose. In the words of AI researchers Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell, mimicking human behaviour is a "bright line" - a clear boundary not to be crossed - in computer software development. We treat interactions with things we perceive as human or human-like differently. With systems such as LaMDA we see their potential perils and the urgent need to design systems in ways that don't abuse our empathy or trust."

"Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks,[3] and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable. This confidence must be well justified and increase with the magnitude of a system's potential effects. OpenAI's recent statement regarding artificial general intelligence, states that "At some point, it may be important to get independent review before starting to train future systems, and for the most advanced efforts to agree to limit the rate of growth of compute used for creating new models." We agree. That point is now."

"A flagship artificial intelligence system designed to predict gun and knife violence before it happens had serious flaws that made it unusable, police have admitted. The error led to large drops in accuracy and the system was ultimately rejected by all of the experts reviewing it for ethical problems."

"According to Derek & Laura Cabrera, "wicked problems result from the mismatch between how real-world systems work and how we think they work". With systems thinking, there is constant testing and feedback between the real world, in all its complexity, and our mental model of it. This openness to test and look for feedback led Dr. Fisman to change his mind on the airborne spread of the coronavirus."