Group items tagged

"If AI causes mass unemployment among the general populace, it will be the first time in history that any technology has ever done that. Industrial machinery, computer-controlled machine tools, software applications, and industrial robots all caused panics about human obsolescence, and nothing of the kind ever came to pass; pretty much everyone who wants a job still has a job. As Noah has written, a wave of recent evidence shows that adoption of industrial robots and automation technology in general is associated with an increase in employment at the company and industry level."

"According to these internal documents, SIAM is a computer system that works behind the scenes of Iranian cellular networks, providing its operators a broad menu of remote commands to alter, disrupt, and monitor how customers use their phones. The tools can slow their data connections to a crawl, break the encryption of phone calls, track the movements of individuals or large groups, and produce detailed metadata summaries of who spoke to whom, when, and where. Such a system could help the government invisibly quash the ongoing protests - or those of tomorrow - an expert who reviewed the SIAM documents told The Intercept."

""As with all technology, there are caveats around making sure that it is used responsibly and not as a licence to cheat, but none of that is insurmountable," he said. In contrast, New York City schools have already banned the use of ChatGPT on all devices and networks because of concerns it will encourage plagiarism. Dr Thomas Lancaster, a computer scientist working at Imperial College London, best known for his research into academic integrity, contract cheating and plagiarism, said it was in many ways a game changer. He said: "It's certainly a major turning point in education where universities have to make big changes."

""Western partners trusted me to distribute stuff, give them actionable feedback and then adapt the product to Ukrainian conditions," he explains during a trip back to San Francisco to harness help from local software engineers. He still spends part of his time in the fragments of the Donbas region that remain under Ukrainian control, so that he can observe his "customers" - Ukrainian soldiers - in action, in order to develop products they can use. "I like to say this is the world's first open-source war," says Oleg Rogynskyy, 35, another Ukrainian who runs a Silicon Valley start-up. He is also helping the Ukrainian cause and exchanging ideas with other computing engineers on social media sites, message groups such as Signal, and GitHub, the platform where coders exchange ideas."

"To arrive at a recommended rent, the software deploys an algorithm - a set of mathematical rules - to analyze a trove of data RealPage gathers from clients, including private information on what nearby competitors charge. For tenants, the system upends the practice of negotiating with apartment building staff. RealPage discourages bargaining with renters and has even recommended that landlords in some cases accept a lower occupancy rate in order to raise rents and make more money. One of the algorithm's developers told ProPublica that leasing agents had "too much empathy" compared to computer generated pricing."

"This takes us to Kerala in south India, home to about 34 million people. There, the communist-led state government is launching something called the Kerala Fibre Optical Network (KFON) - and it's a major milestone. (It is worth noting the irony that the communist government, which has a history of opposing the introduction of computers, is now at the forefront of this digital initiative.) In 2016, the state recognised the internet as a basic citizen's right, joining other polities like Finland, Costa Rica and France. Next on the agenda: making this new right mean something. Despite facing various setbacks - such as the pandemic and a corruption allegation that led to the arrest of the senior bureaucrat who was previously in charge of KFON (he denies the allegation) - the project has finally been launched. It's a fibre-optic broadband network project, aiming to provide affordable and reliable internet connectivity to every household, government institution and business entity in the state."

"His immediate concern is that the internet will be flooded with false photos, videos and text, and the average person will "not be able to know what is true anymore." He is also worried that AI technologies will in time upend the job market. Today, chatbots such as ChatGPT tend to complement human workers, but they could replace paralegals, personal assistants, translators and others who handle rote tasks. "It takes away the drudge work," he said. "It might take away more than that." Down the road, he is worried that future versions of the technology pose a threat to humanity because they often learn unexpected behavior from the vast amounts of data they analyze. This becomes an issue, he said, as individuals and companies allow AI systems not only to generate their own computer code but actually to run that code on their own. And he fears a day when truly autonomous weapons - those killer robots - become reality."

"Their tools analyze content using sophisticated algorithms, picking up on subtle signals to distinguish the images made with computers from the ones produced by human photographers and artists. But some tech leaders and misinformation experts have expressed concern that advances in A.I. will always stay a step ahead of the tools. To assess the effectiveness of current A.I.-detection technology, The New York Times tested five new services using more than 100 synthetic images and real photos. The results show that the services are advancing rapidly, but at times fall short."

"Some experts see platforms like Appen as a new form of data colonialism, says Saiph Savage, director of the Civic AI lab at Northeastern University. "Workers in Latin America are labeling images, and those labeled images are going to feed into AI that will be used in the Global North," she says. "While it might be creating new types of jobs, it's not completely clear how fulfilling these types of jobs are for the workers in the region." Due to the ever moving goal posts of AI, workers are in a constant race against the technology, says Schmidt. "One workforce is trained to three-dimensionally place bounding boxes around cars very precisely, and suddenly it's about figuring out if a large language model has given an appropriate answer," he says, regarding the industry's shift from self-driving cars to chatbots. Thus, niche labeling skills have a "very short half-life." "From the clients' perspective, the invisibility of the workers in microtasking is not a bug but a feature," says Schmidt. Economically, because the tasks are so small, it's more feasible to deal with contractors as a crowd instead of individuals. This creates an industry of irregular labor with no face-to-face resolution for disputes if, say, a client deems their answers inaccurate or wages are withheld. The workers WIRED spoke to say it's not low fees but the way platforms pay them that's the key issue. "I don't like the uncertainty of not knowing when an assignment will come out, as it forces us to be near the computer all day long," says Fuentes, who would like to see additional compensation for time spent waiting in front of her screen. Mutmain, 18, from Pakistan, who asked not to use his surname, echoes this. He says he joined Appen at 15, using a family member's ID, and works from 8 am to 6 pm, and another shift from 2 am to 6 am. "I need to stick to these platforms at all times, so that I don't lose work," he says, but he struggles to earn more than $50

"Imagine having a digital twin that gets ill, and can be experimented on to identify the best possible treatment, without you having to go near a pill or a surgeon's knife. Scientists believe that within five to 10 years, "in silico" trials - in which hundreds of virtual organs are used to assess the safety and efficacy of drugs - could become routine, while patient-specific organ models could be used to personalise treatment and avoid medical complications. Digital twins are computational models of physical objects or processes, updated using data from their real-world counterparts. Within medicine, this means combining vast amounts of data about the workings of genes, proteins, cells and whole-body systems with patients' personal data to create virtual models of their organs - and eventually, potentially their entire body"

"AI tool GNoME finds 2.2 million new crystals, including 380,000 stable materials that could power future technologies Modern technologies from computer chips and batteries to solar panels rely on inorganic crystals. To enable new technologies, crystals must be stable otherwise they can decompose, and behind each new, stable crystal can be months of painstaking experimentation. Today, in a paper published in Nature, we share the discovery of 2.2 million new crystals - equivalent to nearly 800 years' worth of knowledge. We introduce Graph Networks for Materials Exploration (GNoME), our new deep learning tool that dramatically increases the speed and efficiency of discovery by predicting the stability of new materials."

"While the name behind the attack might be relatively new, the criminal technique is not. Ransomware gangs render an organisation's computers inaccessible by infecting them with malicious software - malware - and then demanding a payment, typically in cryptocurrency, to unlock the files. In recent years, however, in a process dubbed "double extortion", the majority of gangs steal data at the same time and threaten to release it online, which they hope will strengthen their negotiating hand."

"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."

"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."

"Given that, isn't it interesting that the one thing nobody talks about at the moment is the environmental impact of the vast amount of computing needed to train and operate LLMs? A world that is dependent on them might be good for business but it would certainly be bad for the planet. Maybe that's what Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the outfit that created ChatGPT, had in mind when he observed that "AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies"."

"But it feels less creepy once you learn that these technologies don't have to rely on a camera to see where you are and what you're doing. Instead, they use radar. Google's Advanced Technology and Products division-better known as ATAP, the department behind oddball projects such as a touch-sensitive denim jacket-has spent the past year exploring how computers can use radar to understand our needs or intentions and then react to us appropriately."

"The specific engineering of ChatGPT has made it quite compelling. But ultimately (at least until it can use outside tools) ChatGPT is "merely" pulling out some "coherent thread of text" from the "statistics of conventional wisdom" that it's accumulated. But it's amazing how human-like the results are. And as I've discussed, this suggests something that's at least scientifically very important: that human language (and the patterns of thinking behind it) are somehow simpler and more "law like" in their structure than we thought. ChatGPT has implicitly discovered it. But we can potentially explicitly expose it, with semantic grammar, computational language, etc."

"But the reporters in those videos aren't real. Their names are Daren and Noah, and they're computer-generated avatars crafted by Synthesia, a London-based artificial intelligence company. The clips are from a YouTube channel called House of News, which presents itself as an English-language media outlet. Researchers say the videos are part of the Venezuelan government's attempts to spin the narrative on social media, considered one of the last bastions of free speech in a nation where outlets are censored and journalists are often persecuted. The incorporation of AI, experts told The Washington Post, seems to be a new addition to the government's disinformation campaigns, which range from incentivizing Twitter users to post specific talking points to using bots that spit out the regime's messaging."

"In Ecuador, journalist Lenin Artieda opened an envelope he received in the newsroom of Ecuavisa TV. Inside was a USB flash drive. But when he inserted the device into his laptop, it exploded. Fortunately, Artieda only suffered minor injuries."

"No matter how much our computers assure us they're backing everything up to a hard drive in the sky, memory failure remains a hardwired part of our lives. Writers reflect on when a digital loss created an emotional hole - from the college essay that disappeared minutes before the due date to an iPhone update that lost years of photographs."