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"There is also a lot of research that both third-party fact-checking and Community Notes can be really effective at reducing misperceptions. But - and this is a significant caveat - neither works well as a complete solution for lies on social media. When Twitter was working on Birdwatch, they claimed it would "not replace other labels and fact checks Twitter currently uses". But as I've written about before, Musk scaled back Twitter's Trust and Safety team significantly and positioned Community Notes as the replacement. As Yoel Roth, Twitter's former head of Trust and Safety, told WIRED, "The intention of Birdwatch was always to be a complement to, rather than a replacement for, Twitter's other misinformation methods." In fact, research on various attempts to mitigate COVID misinformation found that a layered, "Swiss cheese" approach might work best, where some efforts work well sometimes, but collectively the system catches most falsehoods."

"First of all, in the short term I agree with arguments that comparative advantage will continue to keep humans relevant and in fact increase their productivity, and may even in some ways level the playing field between humans. As long as AI is only better at 90% of a given job, the other 10% will cause humans to become highly leveraged, increasing compensation and in fact creating a bunch of new human jobs complementing and amplifying what AI is good at, such that the "10%" expands to continue to employ almost everyone. In fact, even if AI can do 100% of things better than humans, but it remains inefficient or expensive at some tasks, or if the resource inputs to humans and AI's are meaningfully different, then the logic of comparative advantage continues to apply. One area humans are likely to maintain a relative (or even absolute) advantage for a significant time is the physical world. Thus, I think that the human economy may continue to make sense even a little past the point where we reach "a country of geniuses in a datacenter"."

"There, a Facebook-fuelled tsunami of lies had assisted an authoritarian into power. And she had seen where that had led: to opponents of the state being killed in their homes or turning up dead in ditches. As a Filipino American with a foot in both countries - she calls herself "the first of the CNN hybrids" - she was perfectly positioned to warn America about what happens when a populist president is allowed to spread out-of-control lies across a vast, unregulated tech platform. "A lie told a million times becomes a fact," she repeated again and again."

""Social media should not fact check posts" says child molester Mark Zuckerberg "

"As anyone that is anyone knows, Wikipedia holds all truth. So in actual fact, Fenelon was Australia's 30th Prime Minister for two days. He stands alongside Australian meme-generator Tony Abbott, the first female leader Julia Gillard and the man who won't stop speaking Mandarin, Kevin Rudd. "

"Uber knows when your phone battery is running low because its app collects that information in order to switch into power-saving mode. But Chen swears Uber would never use that knowledge to gouge you out of more money. "We absolutely don't use that to kind of like push you a higher surge price, but it's an interesting kind of psychological fact of human behavior," Chen said. Uber's surge pricing uses a proprietary algorithm that accounts for how many users are hailing rides in an area at a given time. Customers are apparently less willing to believe that when the multiplier is a round number like 2.0 or 3.0, which seems more like it could have been arbitrarily made up by a human."

"In fact the $60bn multinational has just been scooped by Nutonomy, a small MIT spin-out whose electric self-driving cabs have already started picking up real customers in a Singapore business park. Initially, riders will use Nutonomy's own app to summon hail a Mitsubishi i-Miev or a Renault Zoe, ramping up to a dozen vehicles in the coming months."

"The performance of LipNet compares incredibly favorably to human lipreading experts on GRID corpus, the largest publicly-available sentence-level lipreading dataset. In fact, where human experts got just 52 percent, LipNet scored 93 percent. Its sentence-based approach to lip-reading also smashed the best previous attempt by a machine, which managed 79.6 percent accuracy on the same dataset."

"The study found that when a person's gait-speed dropped by 5cm/second within a week, this was a sign that they were at increased risk of a fall - in fact, 86% had a fall within three weeks when such a drop in walking speed was observed. By contrast, the elderly residents who had no change in walking speed had a background probability of falling of 19.5%."

"The National Security Agency has made repeated attempts to develop attacks against people using Tor, a popular tool designed to protect online anonymity, despite the fact the software is primarily funded and promoted by the US government itself."

"While capable of mimicking others, the SociBot's slightly sinister side comes from the fact that it is also watching you. Equipped with two cameras in its head and a depth sensor in its chest, it can detect gestures and movements, as well as judge your emotions by mapping the position of your features over a series of internal templates."

"…in about ten years or so, we will see the collapse of Moore's Law. In fact, already, we see a slowing down of Moore's Law. Computer power simply cannot maintain its rapid exponential rise using standard silicon technology. - Dr. Michio Kaku - 2012"

"One of the biggest arguments against mandating backdoors in encryption is the fact that, even if you trust the United States government never to abuse that power (and who does?), other criminal hackers and foreign governments will be able to exploit the backdoor to use it themselves. A backdoor is an inherent vulnerability that other actors will attempt to find and try to use it for their own nefarious purposes as soon as they know it exists, putting all of our cybersecurity at risk. "

"(And, in fact, anonymity apps have brought positives along with the negatives. Not long ago, a post on Secret reported that Google had acquired the poster's five-person company and had hired everyone but her. Later posts revealed that she was the only female at the company and had been there since it was founded. The thread became the talk of Silicon Valley, generating a lively debate about suppressed sexism in the start-up community. The poster's ability to remain anonymous was key to this information coming out. She could stand up to power, speak without embarrassment, and avoid alienating potential employers who might take a dim view of her controversial statements. That's exactly why the First Amendment protects anonymous speech, and that's why the value of anonymity apps like Yik Yak shouldn't be summarily dismissed. "

"The founders of Predictim want to be clear with me: Their product-an algorithm that scans the online footprint of a prospective babysitter to determine their "risk" levels for parents-is not racist. It is not biased. "We take ethics and bias extremely seriously," Sal Parsa, Predictim's CEO, tells me warily over the phone. "In fact, in the last 18 months we trained our product, our machine, our algorithm to make sure it was ethical and not biased. We took sensitive attributes, protected classes, sex, gender, race, away from our training set. We continuously audit our model. And on top of that we added a human review process.""

"As privacy scholar Josh Fairfield says, while some dismiss privacy concerns by saying they have nothing to hide, we shouldn't accept that argument from anyone wearing clothes. Or anyone who closes the bathroom door, locks her home or car, or uses password-protected accounts. Or anyone who benefits from rules and norms that protect secrecy and confidentiality, prohibit government overreach, and give us recourse if others intrude upon our seclusion, publicly disclose embarrassing private facts, depict us in a false light, or appropriate our image or likeness. "

"Already, artificially intelligent software can evolve false political and social constructs highly targeted to sway specific audiences. Users find themselves in highly individualized, algorithmically determined news and information feeds, intentionally designed to: isolate them from conflicting evidence or opinions, create self-reinforcing feedback loops of confirmation, and untether them from fact-based reality. And these are just early days. If memes and disinformation have been weaponized on social media, it is still in the musket stage."

"This led to claims that the software is woefully inaccurate; in fact, police had set the threshold for a match at 60%, meaning that faces do not have to be rated as that similar to be flagged up. This minimises the chance of a person of interest slipping through the net, but also makes a lot of false positives inevitable."

"Doctored images have become a fact of life for political campaigns. When they're disproved, believers 'just don't care.'"