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"Blockchain technology has also opened the way to new models whereby endless micropayments can be made in return for particular online services or content; and, if people voluntarily allow elements of their data to be used, rewards can flow the other way. Here perhaps lies the key to a system beyond the current, Google-led model, in which services appear to be free but the letting-go of personal data is the actual price."

"And these machines' vulnerabilities to hacking are "terrifying", Sarah Teale, co-director along with Simon Ardizzone and Russell Michaels, told the Guardian. America's current election infrastructure is, as Kill Chain explains, a prescription for disaster - an outdated, willfully naive system no more prepared for attack than four years ago."

"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."

"In the first six weeks of 2020, more than 1.6bn of the 2.4bn presidential campaign ads shown to US Facebook users were from the Bloomberg campaign. Since launching his campaign in mid-November, the former mayor of New York City has spent nearly $45m on Facebook ads - more than all his opponents combined."

"The company has revealed the latest evolution of the Captcha (short, sort of, for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), which aims to do away with any interruption at all: the new, "invisible reCaptcha" aims to tell whether a given visitor is a robot or not purely by analysing their browsing behaviour. Barring a short wait while the system does its job, a typical human visitor shouldn't have to do anything else to prove they're not a robot."

"My entry point into this story began, as so many things do, with a late-night Google. Last December, I took an unsettling tumble into a wormhole of Google autocomplete suggestions that ended with "did the holocaust happen". And an entire page of results that claimed it didn't."

"The lack of answers the Jacksonville sheriff's office have provided in Lynch's case is representative of the problems that facial recognition poses across the country. "It's considered an imperfect biometric," said Garvie, who in 2016 created a study on facial recognition software, published by the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law, called The Perpetual Line-Up. "There's no consensus in the scientific community that it provides a positive identification of somebody.""

"Then the other difference is there's been some new research out about the effect that automation has been having in the economy. And it's shown that while for much of the 20th century, automation was creating new jobs faster than it was destroying old jobs, for the last few decades, the opposite has been true: Old jobs have been disappearing faster than new jobs have been created."

"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."

"Learning from rewards seems like the simplest thing. I make coffee, I sip coffee, I'm happy. My brain registers "brewing coffee" as an action that leads to a reward. That's the guiding insight behind deep reinforcement learning, a family of algorithms that famously smashed most of Atari's gaming catalog and triumphed over humans in strategy games like Go. Here, an AI "agent" explores the game, trying out different actions and registering ones that let it win."

"But it wasn't just one day of high engagement. A new study from Cybersecurity For Democracy found that far-right accounts known for spreading misinformation are not only thriving on Facebook, they're actually more successful than other kinds of accounts at getting likes, shares and other forms of user engagement. It wasn't a small edge, either. "It's almost twice as much engagement per follower among the sources that have a reputation for spreading misinformation," Edelson said. "So, clearly, that portion of the news ecosystem is behaving very differently.""

"But unbeknown to Real G and hundreds of criminals who until this week believed that ANOM was the best way to arrange drug deals, money laundering and murders away from the eyes of authorities, the FBI was also secretly copied in on every message. Indeed, in one of the most elaborate and sprawling honeypot traps known to date, the entire communications platform was being covertly operated by the FBI, marking a first for the agency."

Sounds a bit extreme just to make sure no one can log on to your laptop or smartphone, but a team of researchers from Stanford and Northwestern universities as well as SRI International is nonetheless experimenting at the computer-, cognitive- and neuroscience intersection to combat identity theft and shore up cyber security-by taking advantage of the human brain's innate abilities to learn and recognize patterns.

"It can be a tricky balance, especially as machines become more sophisticated. "Usually artificial intelligence systems are capable of coping better than humans because, as an example, they don't suffer from annoyance. They are infinitely patient, they don't care about wasting time," says Mauro Migliardi, associate professor at the University of Padua in Italy. He recently coauthored a paper summarizing 20 years of captcha versions and their effectiveness."

"But could robots ever reproduce? This, undoubtedly, forms a pillar of "life" as shared by all natural organisms. A team of researchers from the UK and the Netherlands have recently demonstrated a fully automated technology to allow physical robots to repeatedly breed, evolving their artificial genetic code over time to better adapt to their environment. Arguably, this amounts to artificial evolution. Child robots are created by mixing the digital "DNA" from two parent robots on a computer."