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"Cathy Hackl: I think it's important to state that there is really no agreed-upon definition right now. Every morning-it's become a bit of a ritual-I go to the Merriam-Webster dictionary and type in the word metaverse. And every day it says this word is not in the dictionary. But if we needed to define it, I tend to have a pretty expansive view of what the metaverse is. I believe it's a convergence of our physical and digital lives. It's our digital lifestyles, which we've been living on phones or computers, slowly catching up to our physical lives in some way, so that full convergence. It is enabled by many different technologies, like AR [augmented reality] and VR [virtual reality], which are the ones that most people tend to think about. But they're not the only entry points. There's also blockchain, which is a big component, there's 5G, there's edge computing, and many, many other technologies. To me, the metaverse is also about our identity and digital ownership. It's about a new extension of human creativity in some ways. But it's not going to be like one day we're going to wake up and exclaim, "The metaverse is here!" It's going to be an evolution."

"Google stunned the world by defeating Go legend Lee Se-dol yesterday, and it wasn't a fluke - AlphaGo, the AI program developed by Google's DeepMind unit, has just won the second game of a five-game Go match being held in Seoul, South Korea. AlphaGo prevailed in a gripping battle that saw Lee resign after hanging on in the final period of byo-yomi ("second-reading" in Japanese) overtime, which gave him fewer than 60 seconds to carry out each move."

"KataGo's world-class AI learned Go by playing millions of games against itself. But that still isn't enough experience to cover every possible scenario, which leaves room for vulnerabilities from unexpected behavior. "KataGo generalizes well to many novel strategies, but it does get weaker the further away it gets from the games it saw during training," says Gleave. "Our adversary has discovered one such 'off-distribution' strategy that KataGo is particularly vulnerable to, but there are likely many others.""

"Kellin Pelrine, an American player who is one level below the top amateur ranking, beat the machine by taking advantage of a previously unknown flaw that had been identified by another computer. But the head-to-head confrontation in which he won 14 of 15 games was undertaken without direct computer support. The triumph, which has not previously been reported, highlighted a weakness in the best Go computer programs that is shared by most of today's widely used AI systems, including the ChatGPT chatbot created by San Francisco-based OpenAI. The tactics that put a human back on top on the Go board were suggested by a computer program that had probed the AI systems looking for weaknesses. The suggested plan was then ruthlessly delivered by Pelrine."

"A Russian YouTuber could face five years in jail after he filmed himself playing Pokémon Go in a church. Ruslan Sokolovsky was filmed catching Pokémon in the Church of All Saints in Yekaterinburg at the beginning of August, when the Pokémon Go hype was at its height."

"Unskilled manual laborers have felt the pressure of automation for a long time - but, increasingly, they're not alone. The last few years have been a bonanza of advances in artificial intelligence. As our software gets smarter, it can tackle harder problems, which means white-collar and pink-collar workers are at risk as well. Here are eight jobs expected to be automated (partially or entirely) in the coming decades. Call Center Employees call-center Telemarketing used to happen in a crowded call center, with a group of representatives cold-calling hundreds of prospects every day. Of those, maybe a few dozen could be persuaded to buy the product in question. Today, the idea is largely the same, but the methods are far more efficient. Many of today's telemarketers are not human. In some cases, as you've probably experienced, there's nothing but a recording on the other end of the line. It may prompt you to "press '1' for more information," but nothing you say has any impact on the call - and, usually, that's clear to you. But in other cases, you may get a sales call and have no idea that you're actually speaking to a computer. Everything you say gets an appropriate response - the voice may even laugh. How is that possible? Well, in some cases, there is a human being on the other side, and they're just pressing buttons on a keyboard to walk you through a pre-recorded but highly interactive marketing pitch. It's a more practical version of those funny soundboards that used to be all the rage for prank calls. Using soundboard-assisted calling - regardless of what it says about the state of human interaction - has the potential to make individual call center employees far more productive: in some cases, a single worker will run two or even three calls at the same time. In the not too distant future, computers will be able to man the phones by themselves. At the intersection of big data, artificial intelligence, and advanced

"Google's AlphaGo AI Go player has defeated Ke Jie, Go world champion, in the opening match of a three game series that will include matches with Jie on Thursday and Saturday. The win was by a narrow margin, but AlphaGo has been programmed to ensure victory, not to run up the score or devastate its opponent, so the margin by which it wins isn't necessarily a good indicator of how easy or hard it was for the computer player to win"

"It's an interesting question. I'm almost not sure how to answer it, because there is no thinking happening on the part of an LLM. A large language model takes the prompts and the text that you give it and tries to come up with something that is responsive and useful in relation to that text. And what's interesting is that certain people - I'm thinking of Mark Andreessen most prominently - have talked about how amazing this is conceptually from an education perspective, because with LLMs you will have this infinitely patient teacher. But that's actually not what you want from a teacher. You want, in some sense, an impatient teacher who's going to push your thinking, who's going to try to understand what you're bringing to any task or educational experience, lift up the strengths that you have, and then work on building your knowledge in areas where you don't yet have it. I don't think LLMs are capable of doing any of that. As you say, there's no real thinking going on. It's just a prediction machine. There's an interaction, I guess, but it's an illusion. Is that the word you would use? Yes. It's the illusion of a conversation. "

""People glamourise them types of things and the smallest thing can be escalated on social media," he said. "A fight can happen between two people and they can squash it [reach a truce], but because the video's out there on social media and it looks from a different perspective like one is losing, pride is going to be hurt so you might go out there and get some sort of revenge and let people know, you're not going to mess with me." It all created anxiety, explained St Clair-Hughes. "The fearmongering on social media puts you in a fight or flight state so when you leave the house now you are either on the front foot or on the back foot. So you step outside ready to do whatever you need to do … It's the subliminals - no one's telling you to pick up a knife and commit violence, it's just the more that you see it …""

"Some are disturbed by the strategy to go "digital by default". Andrew Miller, chair of the Commons science and technology committee, wrote to Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude with concerns that "as public services go online, the government may not keep up with advances in technology and that inadequacies in government software may lead to security vulnerabilities"."

"Fear of data-mining of healthcare could be costing as many as 100,000 lives a year, according to Google's Larry Page. Speaking out in response to fears over his company's vast haul of personal information, Page made the case that not only is Google not going too far with collecting and analysing such information - it's not going far enough."

""The technology is also useful in cases where the driver loses consciousness and has let go of the steering wheel. If such an event occurs, the car will independently pull over. Temporary control of the car is the second wave of driver perception-enhancement - while we are still on the first wave, which culminates with the car's ability to break on its own in case of emergency. Therefore, the next phase is automated driving, the instant you let go of the wheel.""

"On the other side of the table will be his opponent: Alphago, a programme built by Google subsidiary DeepMind which became, in October, the first machine to beat a professional human Go player, the European champion Fan Hui. That match proved that Alphago could hold its own against the best; this one will demonstrate whether "the best" have to relinquish that title entirely."

"And that means that there's now a financial incentive for going after just about anything. While the payoff of going after businesses' networks used to depend on the long play-working deep into the network, finding and packaging data, smuggling it back out-ransomware attacks don't require that level of sophistication today. It's now much easier to convert hacks into cash."

"Is AI going to take all of our jobs? The economy is always in a state of flux. In the 1800s, 80% of the labor force worked on farms; today it's 2%, but we don't have 78% unemployment. Entirely new industries may continue to spring up and offer new employment opportunities. Ironically, "smart manufacturing," which is partly AI, is touted by politicians on the right and on the left as critical to saving American manufacturing jobs. If AI makes businesses more efficient, contributing to growth of the economy, there will be more money to invest in new ventures. There are probably going to be entirely new sectors of the economy in 100 years that we can't even imagine right now. It's possible that total employment will fall, but economic growth will continue as we're able to produce more with less."

"Back in 2016, the Dr Seuss estate won a preliminary court action against "Oh, The Places You'll Boldly Go!" a crowdfunded parody of Dr Seuss's "Oh the Places You'll Go!" and Star Trek, written by veteran Star Trek creator David "Tribble" Gerrold and illustrated by the comics giant Ty Templeton."

"But maybe I'm wrong. Because, if we believe tech gurus at least, the Trolley Problem is about to become of huge real-world importance. Human beings might not find themselves in all that many Trolley Problem-style scenarios over the course of their lives, but soon we're going to start seeing self-driving cars on our streets, and they're going to have to make these judgments all the time."

"The long-running issues of traceability, transparency and enforcement were colourfully illustrated in September 2017 when a group of investigators from the Basel Action Network (BAN) - a non-for-profit group that monitors compliance with the 1989 United Nations Basel Convention on the trade of hazardous wastes - attempted to learn where exactly Australia's e-waste was going. The group fitted 35 old CRT televisions, LED monitors and printers with GPS devices of a special make. Out of this sample the team quickly focused on the fate of three LCD screens dropped at Officeworks storefronts around the Brisbane metro area. Hayley Palmer, BAN's chief operating officer, was on the team that followed where they went afterwards. As the signals left the country, Palmer, her nine-month-old and a colleague tracked the monitors to a warehouse in Hong Kong and then on to an illegal dump-yard in a rural part of Thailand where they talked their way inside."

"The data wars to come? Worryingly, there was one question where the AI simply couldn't come up with a counter argument. When arguing for the motion that "Data will become the most fought-over resource of the 21st century", the Megatron said: The ability to provide information, rather than the ability to provide goods and services, will be the defining feature of the economy of the 21st century. But when we asked it to oppose the motion - in other words, to argue that data wasn't going to be the most vital of resources, worth fighting a war over - it simply couldn't, or wouldn't, make the case. In fact, it undermined its own position: We will able to see everything about a person, everywhere they go, and it will be stored and used in ways that we cannot even imagine."

"So if we put those three findings together, what do we get? * Small groups of * ageing * right-wingers * on their desktop computers (because this study wasn't-couldn't be-carried out on mobile, only desktop) ..get their information from unreliable, partisan news sites. The study doesn't say whether they then go on to share it on Facebook or on their Twitter account grumpyboomer032945231, but it's not hard to imagine that's what happens. This isn't to let the search algorithms off the hook either, but does go to show that the real problem, as ever, lies with the humans."