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"In the meantime, Pham is keen to see if robots can learn to build the chair using only an image of the assembled product as a guide. Will the technology ever help humans who struggle with the task? "I don't think it is in Ikea's business model to have robots assemble their chairs," he said. "In the next 10 to 20 years, people will still be sweating over flat-pack furniture.""

"When Reddit user Throwaway59724 had to start working from home because of Covid, they learned how to automate their IT job duties so they don't have to work more than 10 minutes a day to earn their "just-shy-of-90k" salary."

"Now that might be about to change. The arrival of OpenAI's ChatGPT, a program that generates sophisticated text in response to any prompt you can imagine, may signal the end of writing assignments altogether-and maybe even the end of writing as a gatekeeper, a metric for intelligence, a teachable skill. If you're looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding. My life-and the lives of thousands of other teachers and professors, tutors and administrators-is about to drastically change."

"The articles were so widely and quickly shared that they triggered Facebook's spam filters, which blocked the most popular stories about the breach, including an AP story and a Guardian story. There's no reason to think that Facebook intentionally suppressed embarrassing news about its own business. Rather, this is a cautionary tale about the consequences of content filtering on big platforms."

""While surveillance technology may threaten the privacy of us all, surveillance efforts have historically been used to intimidate and oppress certain communities and groups more than others, including those that are defined by a common race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, income level, sexual orientation, or political perspective.""

"At their core, GANs consist of two networks: the generator and discriminator. These computer programs compete against each other millions-upon-millions of times to refine their image generating skills until they're good enough to create the full-fledged pictures."

""The ethics commission has done pioneering work and has developed the world's first guidelines for automated driving. We are now implementing these guidelines." The ethics rules address a classic thought experiment: the "trolley problem.""

"The unique approach to 'deception detection' analyses the micro-gestures of travellers to figure out if the interviewee is lying."

"The chatbots - BabyQ and the Microsoft-created XiaoBing - were yanked from Chinese messaging app QQ, according to the Financial Times, after they started providing answers that weren't satisfactory to the glorious party.  According to FT, BabyQ would answer the question, "Do you love the Communist Party?" with "No." XiaoBing's transgressions were a bit more direct, declaring for some users "My China dream is to go to America" and answering other patriotic questions with "I'm having my period, wanna take a rest.""

"To date, the presence of Babylon's GP surgery in London has forced the NHS to reallocate millions of pounds in funding to mitigate for the disruption it has caused. Its expansion plans have been blocked before being allowed to proceed. But concerns linger with clinicians questioning the GP surgery's impact and the effectiveness of its much-hyped artificial intelligence platform."

"Apart from biases in the training databases, it's hard to know how well face-recognition systems actually perform in the real world, in spite of recent gains. Anil Jain, a professor of computer science at Michigan State University who has worked on face recognition for more than thirty years, told me, "Most of the testing on the private venders' products is done in a laboratory environment under controlled settings. In real practice, you're walking around in the streets of New York. It's a cold winter day, you have a scarf around your face, a cap, maybe your coat is pulled up so your chin is partially hidden, the illumination may not be the most favorable, and the camera isn't capturing a frontal view.""

"The computers are connected into a kind of hive mind via a downloadable software, allowing the system to run calculations with greater speed and efficiency than any individual device. This is necessary to do the complex work of simulating how the proteins that make up the novel coronavirus behave and where there could be potential binding sites for drugs to latch on to."

""I consider 'bias' a euphemism," says Brandeis Marshall, PhD, data scientist and CEO of DataedX, an edtech and data science firm. "The words that are used are varied: There's fairness, there's responsibility, there's algorithmic bias, there's a number of terms… but really, it's dancing around the real topic… A dataset is inherently entrenched in systemic racism and sexism.""

" The children's charity NSPCC has called on Facebook to resume a programme that scanned private messages for indications of child abuse, with new data suggesting that almost half of referrals for child sexual abuse material are now falling below the radar. Recent changes to the European commission's e-privacy directive, which are being finalised, require messaging services to follow strict new restrictions on the privacy of message data. Facebook blamed that directive for shutting down the child protection operation, but the children's charity says Facebook has gone too far in reading the law as banning it entirely."

"Activists from Fight for the Future prowled the halls of Congress in "jumpsuits with phone strapped to their heads conducting live facial recognition surveillance" to "show why this tech should be banned.""

"But users began to spot flaws in the feature over the weekend. The first to highlight the issue was PhD student Colin Madland, who discovered the issue while highlighting a different racial bias in the video-conference software Zoom. When Madland, who is white, posted an image of himself and a black colleague who had been erased from a Zoom call after its algorithm failed to recognise his face, Twitter automatically cropped the image to only show Madland."

"While Ford still plans on launching its self-driving car fleet in 2021, Hackett added that "its applications will be narrow, what we call geo-fenced, because the problem is so complex.""

"What Hamilton and his colleagues found surprising was that this approach could also be applied to helping find problems with existing deep networks, related to the surge of "deepfakes" that have recently cropped up. They applied this data structure to find areas where probabilistic models, such as the generative adversarial networks (GANs) that are often used to create deepfakes, break down. They coined these problematic areas "blind spots," and note that they give us insight into how GANs can be biased. Such blind spots further show that GANs struggle to represent particular areas of a dataset, even if most of their fakes can fool a human. "