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"or its latest update, which it released Wednesday, the COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub combined nine different mathematical models from different research groups to get an outlook for the pandemic for the next six months. "Any of us who have been following this closely, given what happened with delta, are going to be really cautious about too much optimism," says Justin Lessler at the University of North Carolina, who helps run the hub. "But I do think that the trajectory is towards improvement for most of the country," he says. The modelers developed four potential scenarios, taking into account whether or not childhood vaccinations take off and whether a more infectious new variant should emerge. "

"Frances Haugen: When we live in an information environment that is full of angry, hateful, polarizing content it erodes our civic trust, it erodes our faith in each other, it erodes our ability to want to care for each other, the version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world. 'Ethnic violence' including Myanmar in 2018 when the military used Facebook to launch a genocide. "

"The metaverse is "a virtual environment where you can be present with people in digital spaces," he said. It's "an embodied Internet that you're inside of rather than just looking at. We believe that this is going to be the successor to the mobile Internet.""

""Social media surveillance technologies, such as the software acquired by Michigan State Police, are often introduced under the false premise that they are public safety and accountability tools. In reality, they endanger Black and marginalized communities,""

"Waymo and Cruise are now allowed to launch paid 24/7, fully autonomous driverless car services in San Francisco, state regulators decided Thursday. Why it matters: This is the final approval in both companies' quests to launch their full-fledged services throughout San Francisco."

"That evening was the start of a long nightmare. Whenever Alana forbade Cody from gaming, he had panic attacks, wailing and weeping. He writhed on the floor and told his parents he wanted to die. "It was like taking heroin away from an addict," says Alana. Sometimes she thought, maybe today it will be different, and so she let him play. But the behaviour never changed. "We felt like his drug dealers.""

"They join attempts by lawmakers to regulate the internet for kids. States have proposed and even passed laws that restrict what children can access online, up to banning certain services entirely. On the federal level, several recently introduced bipartisan bills run the gamut from giving children more privacy protections to forbidding them from using social media at all. Some efforts also try to control the content that children can be exposed to. Critics of such legislation point to privacy issues with age verification mechanisms and fears that forced content moderation will inevitably lead to censorship, preventing kids from seeing material that's helpful along with what's considered harmful."

"In some sense, GPT is like a glorified version of cut and paste, where everything that is cut goes through a paraphrasing/synonymy process before it is paste but together-and a lot of important stuff is sometimes lost along the way. When GPT sounds plausible, it is because every paraphrased bit that it pastes together is grounded in something that actual humans said, and there is often some vague (but often irrelevant) relationship between.. At least for now, it still takes a human to know which plausible bits actually belong together."

"One of the many policy-based projects I worked on at Meta was Engagement Bait, which is defined as "a tactic that urges people to interact with Facebook posts through likes, shares, comments, and other actions in order to artificially boost engagement and get greater reach." Accordingly, "Posts and Pages that use this tactic will be demoted." To do this, "models are built off of certain guidelines" trained using "hundreds of thousands of posts" that "teams at Facebook have reviewed and categorized." The examples provided are obvious (eg. a post saying "comment "Yes" if you love rock as much as I do"), but the problem is that there will always be far subtler ways to get people to engage with something artificially. As an example, psychology researchers have a long history of studying negativity bias, which has been shown to operate across a wide array of domains, and to lead to increased online engagement. "

"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."

"Since the 2016 presidential election, the notion that the Russian government somehow "weaponized" social media to push voters to Donald Trump has been widely taken as a gospel in liberal circles. A groundbreaking recent New York University study, however, says there's no evidence Russian tweets had any meaningful effect at all."

"But it isn't just major retailers deploying facial recognition software. Backlash to private use of facial recognition culminated on Wednesday when Livonia skating rink in Michigan was accused of banning a Black teenager after its facial recognition software mistakenly implicated her in a brawl. Lamya Robinson told Fox2 that after her mom dropped her off at the skating rink last Saturday, security guards refused to let her inside, claiming her face had been scanned and the system indicated she was banned after starting a fight in March."

"The combination of the infinite scroll and lack of live links has led to a very specific kind of information economy on the app. Creators whose brand involves discussing news or popular culture (and there are a lot of them) opt to screenshot headlines, summarize articles, and offer their takes. But it's impossible to know whether the creator even read the article or if they're just offering a summary of the online discourse. Even worse are the accounts that spread false headlines, whether they know it or not. Without live links, all these possible situations are presented to you in the exact same way: with a familiar face on your FYP speaking authoritatively."

"It would be a bit glib-and more than a little clichéd-to call this some kind of technological dystopia. Actually, dystopia wouldn't be right, exactly: Dystopian fiction is generally speculative, whereas all of these items and services are real. At the end of September, Amazon announced a suite of tech products in its move toward "ambient intelligence," which Amazon's hardware chief, Dave Limp, described as technology and devices that slip into the background but are "always there," collecting information and taking action against it. This intense devotion to tracking and quantifying all aspects of our waking and non-waking hours is nothing new-see the Apple Watch, the Fitbit, social media writ large, and the smartphone in your pocket-but Amazon has been unusually explicit about its plans. The Everything Store is becoming an Everything Tracker, collecting and leveraging large amounts of personal data related to entertainment, fitness, health, and, it claims, security. It's surveillance that millions of customers are opting in to."

"Jean Twenge blamed the iPhone and social media for a host of social problems in the post-millennial cohort. But the technology thesis hasn't performed well under critical examination, as the Times package notes. "

"Our reliance on their information is now a matter of life and death. Misinformation online has real-world consequences. In the developing world, a hoax claimed India had banned coronavirus social posts, and in the US, 13 percent of people thought coronavirus was a hoax during the critical weeks where earlier notification to shelter-in-place would have saved thousands of lives. Tech platforms have an ability through their persuasive techniques and microtargeting to influence the behavior of society in ways traditional media can't. "

"There's a similar problem in artificial intelligence: The people who develop AI are increasingly having problems explaining how it works and determining why it has the outputs it has. Deep neural networks (DNN)-made up of layers and layers of processing systems trained on human-created data to mimic the neural networks of our brains-often seem to mirror not just human intelligence but also human inexplicability."

"If you've been job hunting recently, chances are you've interacted with a resume robot, a nickname for an Applicant Tracking System, or ATS. In its most basic form, an ATS acts like an online assistant, helping hiring managers write job descriptions, scan resumes and schedule interviews. As artificial intelligence advances, employers are increasingly relying on a combination of predictive analytics, machine learning and complex algorithms to sort through candidates, evaluate their skills and estimate their performance. Today, it's not uncommon for applicants to be rejected by a robot before they're connected with an actual human in human resources. The job market is ripe for the explosion of AI recruitment tools. Hiring managers are coping with deflated HR budgets while confronting growing pools of applicants, a result of both the economic downturn and the post-pandemic expansion of remote work. As automated software makes pivotal decisions about our employment, usually without any oversight, it's posing fundamental questions about privacy, accountability and transparency."

"What is startling about the images in Furey's platform is that they contain mistakes so egregious and easy to spot that it makes one wonder how no one caught the issues, or if, alternatively, Furey believes the typical Toronto resident does in fact have three arms. An increasing number of political figures, particularly on the political right have been using generative AI images in campaigns. Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron Desantis released what look like AI-generated images of his competition, former president Donald Trump, hugging former chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci. The Trump campaign had weeks earlier released a video mocking Desantis' wobbly twitter spaces campaign launch using AI-generated voices."

"The constitutional right to safe, legal abortion has evaporated following the recent Supreme Court decision. Some states with so-called "trigger bans" have immediately criminalized abortion. Next, Congress may seek to criminalize abortion in all 50 states, putting the government in control of peoples' bodies. Google is fully complicit in the criminalization of people seeking abortion care. That's because Google stores historical location data about hundreds of millions of smartphone users, which it routinely shares with government agencies through "geofence" orders that unmask the identities of anyone who traveled to a specific place at a specific time-like an abortion clinic on a specific day. Google received 11,554 such geofence warrants in 2020."