Group items tagged

"As dire as that sounds, panic isn't in order just yet. Researchers are already working on "quantum-resistant" encryption. Some companies claim to have made significant progress in the field. Google, among others, is working on a new form of security for its browser that might rebuff a quantum algorithm."

"Sequencing cancer to find the breaks has become easy and cheap. But information on which drugs might or might not work on particular mutations remains buried in PDF files and scattered across medical journals."

"What might happen next? First the investigators would find out the culprits' names, telephone numbers, and where they lived. Then the authorities would be alerted. Shortly afterwards, accounts would be closed down. And, in the worst cases, the police would prosecute. Finally, as people began to realise that actions online had actual consequences, many would start modifying their behaviour. The tsunami of online hate might eventually become a sea swell."

"Once you gather up every reported incident of violence in one place, however, the threat seems far greater. A record of up to date criminal activity might be useful if you are new to an area. Businesses considering locations and homeowners interested in moving might use it to get certain information. But it can also facilitate panic and unjustified accusations."

"It remains possible, however, that the true costs of social-media anxieties are harder to tabulate. Gentzkow told me that, for the period between 2016 and 2020, the direct effects of misinformation were difficult to discern. "But it might have had a much larger effect because we got so worried about it-a broader impact on trust," he said. "Even if not that many people were exposed, the narrative that the world is full of fake news, and you can't trust anything, and other people are being misled about it-well, that might have had a bigger impact than the content itself." Nyhan had a similar reaction. "There are genuine questions that are really important, but there's a kind of opportunity cost that is missed here. There's so much focus on sweeping claims that aren't actionable, or unfounded claims we can contradict with data, that are crowding out the harms we can demonstrate, and the things we can test, that could make social media better." He added, "We're years into this, and we're still having an uninformed conversation about social media. It's totally wild.""

"Nelson said it's likely that AI will replace some jobs in Hollywood while also potentially creating more. He pointed to the entrance of computer-editing software, and how that replaced more manual movie-editing jobs and processes. "There are some jobs that might just go away entirely," he said. "There might be some pain, but through it all, I think there's just going to be more opportunities." Media and legal experts also said the use of AI in filmmaking raises several concerns - and the law is still unclear."

"Do the potential paying customers for these large models add up to enough money to keep the servers on? That's the 13 trillion dollar question, and the answer is the difference between WorldCom and Enron, or dotcoms and cryptocurrency. Though I don't have a certain answer to this question, I am skeptical. AI decision support is potentially valuable to practitioners. Accountants might value an AI tool's ability to draft a tax return. Radiologists might value the AI's guess about whether an X-ray suggests a cancerous mass. But with AIs' tendency to "hallucinate" and confabulate, there's an increasing recognition that these AI judgments require a "human in the loop" to carefully review their judgments. In other words, an AI-supported radiologist should spend exactly the same amount of time considering your X-ray, and then see if the AI agrees with their judgment, and, if not, they should take a closer look. AI should make radiology more expensive, in order to make it more accurate. But that's not the AI business model. AI pitchmen are explicit on this score: The purpose of AI, the source of its value, is its capacity to increase productivity, which is to say, it should allow workers to do more, which will allow their bosses to fire some of them, or get each one to do more work in the same time, or both. The entire investor case for AI is "companies will buy our products so they can do more with less." It's not "business custom­ers will buy our products so their products will cost more to make, but will be of higher quality.""

"A pilot study by academics at the University of Oxford found some care providers had been using generative AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Bard to create care plans for people receiving care. That presents a potential risk to patient confidentiality, according to Dr Caroline Green, an early career research fellow at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford, who surveyed care organisations for the study. "If you put any type of personal data into [a generative AI chatbot], that data is used to train the language model," Green said. "That personal data could be generated and revealed to somebody else." She said carers might act on faulty or biased information and inadvertently cause harm, and an AI-generated care plan might be substandard."

"In short, Klarna offers shoppers something similar to a store credit card - rather than paying $500 now, you might split it into 12 payments with a micro-loan from Klarna that gets issued within minutes. The e-commerce provider then pays Klarna a fee (usually around 6 percent, higher than what they'd pay for a Visa or Mastercard transaction, but still a good deal if it makes it easier for the customer to buy the product). As you might imagine, Klarna has lots of customers and those customers have a lot of questions. This means they hire lots of customer service representatives. And those customer service reps are the first major, public casualty in the conflict between AI and human jobs."

"After discussing the general absurdity and creepiness of not being allowed to freely criticize the government for the order they brought to his company, he concludes by saying that he's stopped using email altogether, and "If you knew what I know about email, you might not use it either." "

"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. "

"Commentary: Our emails are getting more impolite and that might be a problem Although some choose to dive into their content immediately, starting your emails with an opening greeting could raise the chances of them being read, says the Financial Times' Pilita Clark."

" With more than 40% of the world's estimated 7,000 languages "endangered and at risk of extinction", an army of tiny publishers is fighting an unsung battle to save them. UK press Diglot Books is one of them, and this week took on the might of Amazon to get its Cornish children's story out to readers. Told by the internet giant that Matthew and the Wellington Boots (Matthew ha'n Eskisyow Glaw in Cornish, or Kernewek) would not be made available through Kindle Direct Publishing because it was in a language that is "not currently supported" by the platform, Diglot petitioned the retailer."

"There are concerning stories of censorship and surveillance coming from many countries. Have the stories added up to dramatic authoritarian tendencies, or do they cancel out the benefits of having more and more civic engagement over digital media? Fancier graphic design might help bring home the punchline. There are still no good examples of countries with rapidly growing internet populations and increasingly authoritarian governments."

"The blackouts coincided with exams for secondary and high-school students and were implemented as the ultimate step in the country's battle to stop students cheating using smuggled mobile phones and internet-connected devices in exam halls. While attempting to ban mobile phones from exams or setting up local jamming equipment might be a less draconian measure, shutting off the internet is undoubtedly efficient. However, the outage impacted every person and business in the parts of the country controlled by the Iraqi government, causing human rights campaigners, including Access Now, to condemn the move."

""The fights between bots can be far more persistent than the ones we see between people," said Taha Yasseri, who worked on the study at the Oxford Internet Institute. "Humans usually cool down after a few days, but the bots might continue for years.""

"DeepCoder uses a technique called program synthesis: creating new programs by piecing together lines of code taken from existing software - just like a programmer might. Given a list of inputs and outputs for each code fragment, DeepCoder learned which pieces of code were needed to achieve the desired result overall. "It could allow non-coders to simply describe an idea for a program and let the system build it""

"No, really, it's possible that Microsoft's Excel is the most dangerous software on the planet. Yes, more dangerous than rogue code running a nuclear power plant, than the Stuxnet that was deliberately sent off to sabotage Iran's nuclear program, worse, even, than whatever rent in the fabric of space time led to the invention of Lolcats. Really, that serious."