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"Now, there's a new concern: malicious apps developed by third parties and hosted by Amazon or Google. The threat isn't just theoretical. Whitehat hackers at Germany's Security Research Labs developed eight apps-four Alexa "skills" and four Google Home "actions"-that all passed Amazon or Google security-vetting processes. The skills or actions posed as simple apps for checking horoscopes, with the exception of one, which masqueraded as a random-number generator. Behind the scenes, these "smart spies," as the researchers call them, surreptitiously eavesdropped on users and phished for their passwords."

"The long-running issues of traceability, transparency and enforcement were colourfully illustrated in September 2017 when a group of investigators from the Basel Action Network (BAN) - a non-for-profit group that monitors compliance with the 1989 United Nations Basel Convention on the trade of hazardous wastes - attempted to learn where exactly Australia's e-waste was going. The group fitted 35 old CRT televisions, LED monitors and printers with GPS devices of a special make. Out of this sample the team quickly focused on the fate of three LCD screens dropped at Officeworks storefronts around the Brisbane metro area. Hayley Palmer, BAN's chief operating officer, was on the team that followed where they went afterwards. As the signals left the country, Palmer, her nine-month-old and a colleague tracked the monitors to a warehouse in Hong Kong and then on to an illegal dump-yard in a rural part of Thailand where they talked their way inside."

"Depending on how legal decisions shake out, AI systems could become a valuable tool to assist creativity, a nuisance ripping off hard-working human musicians, or both."

"The robot was so popular that the Diligent team programmed superfluous activities for Moxi to do once an hour so that the robot would wander around the floor and flash heart eyes at people. "In between tasks Moxi would make a social lap to talk to her fans," Thomaz says."

"Dubbed TraceTogether, the app is able to identify people who have been in close proximity - within 2m for at least 30 minutes - to coronavirus patients using wireless Bluetooth technology, said its developers, the Government Technology Agency (GovTech) and the Ministry of Health (MOH), on Friday (March 20)."

"As such, there are certainly some sinister ways technology like this could be used-and the faces don't need to be attractive, they just need to look real. Any circumstances where it would be useful to have fake people-like profile photos for dummy social media accounts used to manipulate online discourse-are a ready target for technological treachery."

"Crucial to his success, he says, was YouTube's recommendation system, the feature that promotes videos for you to watch on the homepage or in the "Up Next" column to the right of whatever you're watching. "We were recommended constantly," he tells me. YouTube's algorithms, he says, figured out that "people getting into flat earth apparently go down this rabbit hole, and so we're just gonna keep recommending.""

"But, being pro-technology doesn't mean that I have to pretend there is no danger. Most people are unaware of the ways their technology is holding them back. The good news is that once you become aware, it's not too difficult to start getting things back on track. It's possible use technology while keeping yourself protected from its detrimental effects."

"In September last year, researchers at New York University and Harvard Business School published their analysis of the emails and online meetings of 3.1 million remote workers in such cities as Chicago, New York, London, Tel Aviv and Brussels, in the very early phases of their countries' first lockdowns. They found that the length of the average working day had increased by 8.2%, or nearly 50 minutes, "largely due to writing emails and attending meetings beyond office hours"."

"A study last year of 3.1 million workers in North America, Europe and the Middle East found "significant and durable increases" in both the average number of emails sent internally, and the number of recipients. By measuring the time between the first and last emails sent (or meetings attended) in a 24-hour period, the researchers concluded that, since the pandemic, the average workday had extended by 48.5 minutes."

"Citizen, which was launched in 2017, is a glorified police scanner that promises to help users "stay safe and informed". It invites input from witnesses - mostly involving shaky phone footage of police milling around while a stretcher is carted by in the background - and, bafflingly, includes a comments section, in which users speculate fatuously on the crime in question and quibble over the accuracy of the map function. It is grimly fascinating, mildly addictive and, relative to its stated aims, totally without value."

"The software, 4 Little Trees, was created by Hong Kong-based startup Find Solution AI. While the use of emotion recognition AI in schools and other settings has caused concern, founder Viola Lam says it can make the virtual classroom as good as - or better than - the real thing. Students work on tests and homework on the platform as part of the school curriculum. While they study, the AI measures muscle points on their faces via the camera on their computer or tablet, and identifies emotions including happiness, sadness, anger, surprise and fear. "

"self-awareness: Columbia engineers created a robot that could figure out what it looked like without any external input. In essence, it could imagine itself"

"According to Folding@Home, the organisation that runs the distributed computing effort, the combined power of the network broke 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second - or one "exaflop" - on 25 March."

"In the future, the team predict the software could also learn the appropriate emotion to express at a given time. "It could be mostly empathic," said Huang, adding that a challenge would be to avoid the chatbot reinforcing negative feelings such as rage."

"GPT-3 medical chatbot tells suicidal test patient to kill themselves"

"Microsoft's decision to replace human journalists with robots has backfired, after the tech company's artificial intelligence software illustrated a news story about racism with a photo of the wrong mixed-race member of the band Little Mix."