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"Researchers fed these algorithms (which function like autocomplete, but for images) pictures of a man cropped below his neck: 43% of the time the image was autocompleted with the man wearing a suit. When you fed the same algorithm a similarly cropped photo of a woman, it auto-completed her wearing a low-cut top or bikini a massive 53% of the time. For some reason, the researchers gave the algorithm a picture of the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and found that it also automatically generated an image of her in a bikini. (After ethical concerns were raised on Twitter, the researchers had the computer-generated image of AOC in a swimsuit removed from the research paper.)"

"Assigning female genders to digital assistants such as Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa is helping entrench harmful gender biases, according to a UN agency."

"But whether we trust Apple might be beside the point, if we don't yet know whether we can trust ourselves. It took eight years from the launch of the iPhone for screen time controls to follow. What will human interaction look like eight years after smartglasses become ubiquitous? Our cyborg present sneaked up on us as our phones became glued to our hands. Are we going to sleepwalk into our cyborg future in the same way?"

"Before Covid-19, many of us thought remote working sounded blissful. Now, employees across the world long for chats by the coffee machine and the whirr of printers"

"Google said in a new blog post that hackers linked to the Chinese government have been impersonating antivirus software McAfee to try to infect victims' machines with malware. And, Google says, the hackers appear to be the same group that unsuccessfully targeted the presidential campaign of former Vice President Joe Biden with a phishing attack earlier this year. A similar group of hackers based in Iran had tried to target President Trump's campaign, but also was unsuccessful."

"You're craving a McFlurry, or a Shamrock Shake."

"Researchers showed detectors can be defeated by inserting inputs called adversarial examples into every video frame. The adversarial examples are slightly manipulated inputs which cause artificial intelligence systems such as machine learning models to make a mistake. In addition, the team showed that the attack still works after videos are compressed."

"The answer is simple: nobody, including opinion pollsters, knew about the Trump campaign's astonishing mastery of social media, especially Facebook. Trump may not have known much about that at the time - he really only understood Twitter - but Brad Parscale and his team sure knew how to make use of Facebook's micro-targeting machine. And they did."

"Microsoft's decision to replace human journalists with robots has backfired, after the tech company's artificial intelligence software illustrated a news story about racism with a photo of the wrong mixed-race member of the band Little Mix."

"One of the problems with The Social Dilemma is that it supposes that tech did what it claims it did - that these are actually such incredible geniuses that they figured out how to use machine learning to control minds. And that's the problem - the mind control thing they designed to sell you fidget spinners got hijacked to make your uncle racist. But there's another possibility, which is that their claims are rubbish. They just overpromised in their sales material, and that what actually happened with that growth of monopolies and corruption in the public sphere made people cynical, angry, bitter and violent. In which case the problem isn't that their tools were misused. The problem is that the structures in which those tools were developed are intrinsically corrupt and corrupting."

"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."

"The streaming video company's recommendation algorithm can sometimes send you on an hours-long video binge so captivating that you never notice the time passing. But according to a study from software nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, trusting the algorithm means you're actually more likely to see videos featuring sexualized content and false claims than personalized interests."

"Late last year, IBM took the record for the largest quantum computing system with a processor that contained 433 quantum bits, or qubits, the fundamental building blocks of quantum information processing. Now, the company has set its sights on a much bigger target: a 100,000-qubit machine that it aims to build within 10 years."

"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. "

"The chief working officer of Techbuyer, an IT asset disposal firm in Harrogate, was standing in a big windowless room of an information centre in London surrounded by hundreds of used exhausting drives owned by a bank card firm. Knowing he might wipe the drives and promote them on, he provided a six-figure sum for all of the units. The reply was no. Instead, a lorry could be pushed as much as the positioning and the data-storing units could be dropped inside by authorised safety personnel. Then industrial machines would shred them into tiny fragments. "

"Could office emails go the way of the fax machine and the rolodex? They have not joined those workplace dinosaurs yet, but there were signs of evolutionary change at the annual gathering of business leaders in Davos this week, where tech bosses said emails were becoming outdated. The chief executive of the IT firm Wipro, which employs 260,000 people worldwide, said about 10% of his staff "don't even check one email per month" and that he used Instagram and LinkedIn to talk to staff."