"At the Seco Innovation Laboratory in Fagersta, Sweden, R&D technician Jan Gravningsbråten, could easily be mistaken for a mad scientist, surrounded by blinking red lasers, trays of inserts under observation, diagnostic equipment and countless other measuring devices, all in aid of his ongoing work with data matrix codes, also known as QR codes."
"But it is also revealing of a tech culture that venerates profit above social usefulness - and which takes as implicit its right to innovate without limits, despite the consequences. AI that can find its own route to wealth is likely to displace jobs, change the nature of commerce, funnel power into the hands of the few and spread unrest among the many."
"The Home Office plans to use artificial intelligence to reduce the asylum backlog, and is launching a three-day hackathon in the search for quicker ways to process the 138,052 undecided asylum cases.
The government is convening academics, tech experts, civil servants and business people to form 15 multidisciplinary teams tasked with brainstorming solutions to the backlog. Teams will be invited to compete to find the most innovative solutions, and will present their ideas to a panel of judges. The winners are expected to meet the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, in Downing Street for a prize-giving ceremony."
"Economists even have a term for it - the "lump of labor" fallacy. Innovation may destroy occupations but there is no fixed number of jobs and new ones take their place. Warehouse jobs, for example, replaced retail jobs as online shopping decimated shopping malls."
"n a way, though, that's still the same phenomenon: the people in those situations lost boomerangs and Roman concrete because they didn't care anymore. They had more pressing concerns.
So: loss of technology is not impossible. But to an innovative and large culture like modern human civilization, it's not really something that happens. It's just a fun trope for stories. Let's hope it remains that way."
""Thanks to special copyright protections from Congress, woke corporations like Disney have earned billions while increasingly pandering to woke activists," Hawley said in a press release. "It's time to take away Disney's special privileges and open up a new era of creativity and innovation."
His proposal would apply retroactively to copyright owners with a market capitalization of more than $150 billion in the motion pictures and videos or arts, entertainment, and recreation industries."
"Some of those rules have had unintended consequences: a law meant to prevent piracy also prevents you from fixing your own car, using generic printer ink, or adapting your e-reader for your visual impairment. And a law meant to encourage innovation is routinely abused to remove critical commentary and new creativity."
"The economist Oren Cass has a compelling answer for these concerns. He says they suffer from bias: the idea that this technological revolution is somehow unique, when we have lived through many epochs of innovation and upheaval. They also overestimate the pace of change (robots are a long way off from competing with humans in many areas) and assume that new kinds of jobs will not be created in the process."
"The independent review on equity in medical devices once again highlights the multiple ways in which medical technology development can lead to solutions whereby the benefits are distributed inequitably across society, or can further exacerbate health inequalities (UK report reveals bias within medical tools and devices, 11 March). While the report is welcome, the challenge facing scientists and engineers is how to innovate medical devices differently to respond to longstanding societal biases and inequalities."
"There are two key themes that stand out incredibly strongly in this: both Microsoft and Apple did an awful lot of what they did by shamelessly copying the work of others, and the big companies floating around the space (mainly IBM and Xerox) clearly had no clue at all about what was going on."
"Teatreneu's administrators found an ingenious solution: partnering with the advertising agency Cyranos McCann, they fitted the back of every seat with fancy tablets that can analyse facial expressions. Under the new model, visitors enter the club for free but have to pay 30 cents for every laugh recognised by the tablet - with a cap of €24 (or 80 laughs) per show. A mobile app makes it easier to complete the payment; the overall ticket prices have reportedly gone up by €6. As a bonus, you can also share your smiling selfie with friends: the path from funny to viral has never been shorter."
"The UK's impending exit from the EU has provided an urgent economic need for such a facility - a UN report last month found at least $10bn (£7.9bn) of gold, platinum and other precious metals were dumped every year in a growing mountain of e-waste."
"As part of her undergraduate research, Alice Xue studied whether a machine could pass a Visual Turing Test by producing images that people cannot tell were made by a machine. Xue trained an algorithm using 2,192 traditional Chinese landscape paintings collected from art museums. The resulting AI-generated paintings were mistaken for being made by humans 55 per cent of the time."
The Canadian office of primary commissioner stated the changes in the privacy policies, especially after 9-11 when the privacy laws were looked past to concentrate on the gathering of information to reduce terrorism in the US and Canada with no real results. However, this problem has been tackled in Canada and stated that they "believe that Canadians deserve federal privacy laws based on rights. The incorporation of a rights-based framework in our privacy laws would help support responsible innovation and foster trust in government, giving people confidence to fully participate in the digital age."