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"Researchers at Columbia University sought to shed light on the problem by tasking 400 AI engineers with creating algorithms that made over 8.2 million predictions about 20,000 people. In a study accepted by the NeurIPS 2020 machine learning conference, the researchers conclude that biased predictions are mostly caused by imbalanced data but that the demographics of engineers also play a role."

"Some standards did spread and crystallise over time, as more books were printed and literacy rates climbed. The printing profession played a key role in these emergent norms. Printing houses developed habits for spelling frequent words, often based on what made setting type more efficient. In a manuscript, hadde might be replaced with had; thankefull with thankful. When it came to spelling, the primary objective wasn't to faithfully represent the author's spelling, nor to uphold some standard idea of 'correct' English - it was to produce texts that people could read and, more importantly, that they would buy. Habits and tricks became standards, as typesetters learned their trade by apprenticing to other typesetters. They then often moved around as journeymen workers, which entailed dispersing their own habits or picking up those of the printing houses they worked in."

"The type of device matters-some are associated with worse student outcomes. Geography matters-technology is associated with higher student outcomes in the United States than in other regions. Who is using the technology matters-technology in the hands of teachers is associated with higher scores than technology in the hands of students. Intensity matters-students who use technology intensely or not at all perform better than those with moderate use. A school system's current performance level matters-in lower-performing school systems, technology is associated with worse results."

"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."

"When Reddit user Throwaway59724 had to start working from home because of Covid, they learned how to automate their IT job duties so they don't have to work more than 10 minutes a day to earn their "just-shy-of-90k" salary."

"The technology is seemingly not the problem, and in some respects it is not the solution either. High productivity growth will come only to those that learn how to use it best"

"Second Life's endurance demonstrates that, whatever the configuration, a metaverse's success can only be founded on human qualities of social interaction and self-expression. "I obviously don't feel as excited now as when I started roaming around Second Life," Aufwie says. "But I still feel gratitude towards this apparently everlasting pioneering metaverse that allowed me to express myself, make friends, learn and share thoughts and all the good things humanity has within it.""

"How do you maximize food production and prevent waste in your supply chain at a time when climate change and a growing global population are placing an increasing strain on resources?  According to Israeli startup Blue Circle, you do it in the same way you protect your technology from hackers: with artificial intelligence, machine learning and huge amounts of data. "

"This is partially why online anonymity is so important - it gives people the grace of exploration and inquiry. It allows people to make choices, change their minds, learn, and grow. TikTok doesn't make room for this kind of internet exploration; it makes it impossible to have curiosity without consequence. TikTok isn't alone in using engagement and recommender algorithms to curate personalised content feeds, but it does take it to the extreme. This is profitable both because it keeps people scrolling and because there's very little difference between being able to personalise content and personalise ads."

"Nor are car owners the only consumers learning that software can be tricksy in a way hardware cannot. In 2017, Apple admitted that its software was slowing down the performance of older iPhones. It said that the design was aimed at saving battery life, but critics said it was an example of "planned obsolescence" - artificially shortening the life of a device to make buyers upgrade sooner. In 2009, Amazon provided a perfect metaphor for the potentially dystopian implications of the subscription economy when, without warning, it revoked copies of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four from all its Kindle e-readers."

"During the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of Americans will be forced to work, play, and learn from home for the foreseeable future. Such a massive shift will lean not only on shaky and expensive U.S. broadband networks, but popular teleconferencing programs that often don't quite work as advertised. Zoom in particular has seen a flood of new users, and the company's stock has jumped roughly 20 percent since the COVID-19 outbreak began. But as new users flock to the platform for work, they should be aware of a few things: namely, the company's data collection, its shaky privacy policy, and the fact your boss knows when you're not giving them your undivided attention."

"The CEO of OpenAI, the company responsible for creating artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT and image generator Dall-E 2, said "regulation of AI is essential" as he testified in his first appearance in front of the US Congress. The apocalypse isn't coming. We must resist cynicism and fear about AI Stephen Marche Stephen Marche Read more Speaking to the Senate judiciary committee on Tuesday, Sam Altman said he supported regulatory guardrails for the technology that would enable the benefits of artificial intelligence while minimizing the harms. "We think that regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models," Altman said in his prepared remarks."

"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."

"Parent "Portals," as utilized in K12 education, are doing significant harm to student development.[1] For those not familiar, Parent Portals are learning management systems that provide "real time" information to parents of school-aged children: "grades, attendance, assignments, and more." On a daily basis parents can monitor their child's performance in school and intervene at home. In theory, this seems like a good thing. But what is the difference between "real time" data and constant surveillance? In my view, not much. What if surveillance is not conducive to education? I'm working this one out. Let's see where it goes."

"Spyware apps were foisted on students at the height of the Covid-19 lockdowns. Today, long after most students have returned to in-person learning, those apps are still proliferating, and enabling an ever-expanding range of human rights abuses. In a recent Center for Democracy and Technology report, 81 percent of teachers said their schools use some form of this "student monitoring" spyware. Yet many of the spyware companies supplying these apps seem neither prepared nor concerned about the harms they are inflicting on students. "

"The camera never lies. Except, of course, it does - and seemingly more often with each passing day. In the age of the smartphone, digital edits on the fly to improve photos have become commonplace, from boosting colours to tweaking light levels. Now, a new breed of smartphone tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI) are adding to the debate about what it means to photograph reality. Google's latest smartphones released last week, the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, go a step further than devices from other companies. They are using AI to help alter people's expressions in photographs. It's an experience we've all had: one person in a group shot looks away from the camera or fails to smile. Google's phones can now look through your photos to mix and match from past expressions, using machine learning to put a smile from a different photo of them into the picture. Google calls it Best Take. "

"Abbott's experience mirrors the situation faced by Africans who don't speak English. Many language models like ChatGPT do not perform well for languages with smaller numbers of speakers, especially African ones. But a new venture called Lelapa AI, a collaboration between Abbott and a biomedical engineer named Pelonomi Moiloa, is trying to use machine learning to create tools that specifically work for Africans."

"Can AI bring personalized tutors to every student? The AI education tools being piloted today are mind-blowing because they are tailored to each individual learner. Some of them-like Khanmigo and MATHia-are already remarkable, and they'll only get better in the years ahead. One of the things that excites me the most about this type of technology is the possibility of localizing it to every student, no matter where they live. For example, a team in Nairobi is working on Somanasi, an AI-based tutor that aligns with the curriculum in Kenya. The name means "learn together" in Swahili, and the tutor has been designed with the cultural context in mind so it feels familiar to the students who use it."

"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."

"Now that might be about to change. The arrival of OpenAI's ChatGPT, a program that generates sophisticated text in response to any prompt you can imagine, may signal the end of writing assignments altogether-and maybe even the end of writing as a gatekeeper, a metric for intelligence, a teachable skill. If you're looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding. My life-and the lives of thousands of other teachers and professors, tutors and administrators-is about to drastically change."