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"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."

""As expected, we found evidence of a performance improvement over generations due to social learning," the researchers wrote. "Adding an algorithm with a different problem-solving bias than humans temporarily improved human performance but improvements were not sustained in following generations. While humans did copy solutions from the algorithm, they appeared to do so at a lower rate than they copied other humans' solutions with comparable performance." Brinkmann told Motherboard that while they were surprised superior solutions weren't more commonly adopted, this was in line with other research suggesting human biases in decision-making persist despite social learning. Still, the team is optimistic that future research can yield insight into how to amend this."

"Performance of AMIE In this setting, we observed that AMIE performed simulated diagnostic conversations at least as well as PCPs when both were evaluated along multiple clinically-meaningful axes of consultation quality. AMIE had greater diagnostic accuracy and superior performance for 28 of 32 axes from the perspective of specialist physicians, and 24 of 26 axes from the perspective of patient actors. "

"This person or group, who go by the names BestBuy and Popopret, recently spammed an ad to folks on Jabber, an instant messaging service. They offered to perform a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on whomever their client(s) wanted, and they backed up their offer by claiming to wield the ability to perform some of the strongest DDoS attacks ever seen. Recent events in the history of the internet show us that these kind of attacks - if these hackers indeed have the power they claim - can wreak internet havoc by blocking user access to a range of some of the web's most popular destinations."

"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

"The Future of Jobs Report arrives as the rising tide of automation is expected to displace millions of American workers in the long term and as corporations, educational institutions and elected officials grapple with a global technological shift that may leave many people behind. The report, published Monday, envisions massive changes in the worldwide workforce as businesses expand the use of artificial intelligence and automation in their operations. Machines account for 29 percent of the total hours worked in major industries, compared with 71 percent performed by people. By 2022, however, the report predicts that 42 percent of task hours will be performed by machines and 58 percent by people"

"The use for humans in the world of robotics, even as teachers, is shrinking thanks to AI. NVIDIA Research has announced the creation of Eureka, an AI agent powered by GPT-4 that has trained robots to perform tasks using reward algorithms. Notably, Eureka taught a robotic hand to do pen spinning tricks as well as a human can (honestly, as you can see in the YouTube video below, better than many of us)."

"The new AI Index report notes that in 2023, AI still struggled with complex cognitive tasks like advanced math problem-solving and visual commonsense reasoning. However, 'struggled' here might be misleading; it certainly doesn't mean AI did badly. Performance on MATH, a dataset of 12,500 challenging competition-level math problems, improved dramatically in the two years since its introduction. In 2021, AI systems could solve only 6.9% of problems. By contrast, in 2023, a GPT-4-based model solved 84.3%. The human baseline is 90%. "

"At its core, the researchers' "Planning with Uncertain Specifications" (PUnS) system gives robots the human-like planning ability to simultaneously weigh many ambiguous - and potentially contradictory - requirements to reach an end goal. In doing so, the system always chooses the most likely action to take, based on a "belief" about some probable specifications for the task it is supposed to perform."

"We live in a performative age. We're rewarded for revealing our private lives to strangers, for exaggerating our emotions online, for sharing every crisis that happens in our bodies, every thought that passes through our heads. So many of us now depend on the reactions of strangers for our own identity."

"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."

"But with all of the successes of AI, it's also important to pay attention to when, and how, it can go wrong, in order to prevent future errors. A recent paper by Roman Yampolskiy, director of the Cybersecurity Lab at the University of Louisville, outlines a history of AI failures which are "directly related to the mistakes produced by the intelligence such systems are designed to exhibit." According to Yampolskiy, these types of failures can be attributed to mistakes during the learning phase or mistakes in the performance phase of the AI system."

"As the miles grow, the odds shrink. At some point, a car driving autonomously or semi-autonomously will cause a fatal accident. If their performance is remotely comparable to a human's, that moment could come within the next 18-24 months. If so, by the law of averages it will probably involve a Tesla Model 3. Self-driving cars may be about to have their Driscoll moment."

"Dye told the Wall Street Journal that hackers increasingly use novel methods and bugs in the software of computers to perform attacks, resulting in about 55% cyberattacks going unnoticed by commercial antivirus software."

"The algorithm at play is performing what's commonly referred to as predictive policing. Using years - and sometimes decades - worth of crime reports, the algorithm analyses the data to identify areas with high probabilities for certain types of crime, placing little red boxes on maps of the city that are streamed into patrol cars."

"As soon as 20 years from now, 45 percent of American jobs may be performed by computers, as many as 10 million self-driving cars will be on the roads, and robots-computerized machines-will infiltrate almost every arena of our daily lives, from healthcare to energy production."

"Facebook is considering incorporating most of its 1 billion-plus members' profile photos into its growing facial recognition database, expanding the scope of the social network's controversial technology. The possible move, which Facebook revealed in an update to its data use policy on Thursday, is intended to improve the performance of its "tag suggest" feature. The feature uses facial recognition technology to speed up the process of labelling or "tagging" friends and acquaintances who appear in photos posted on the network"

"Atlas is a semi-autonomous system. The operator tells the robot where to be and what position to take, such as where to put its hands on a vacuum cleaner, and then the robot comes up with a plan of how to do that. For some chores Atlas's actions are logical and human-like. Others require re-thinking of how to get the job done in a way that its quite different to the way a person would perform the action."

""Could teaching be trumped by a learning machine? Are we beginning to glimpse the possibility of machines that teach themselves to teach? They learn what works, what doesn't and deliver ever better performance. We see the embryonic evidence for this in adaptive learning systems, that are truly algorithmic, and do use machine learning, to improve as they deliver. The more students they teach, the better they get. They even tech themselves. This is not science fiction. This is real AI, in real software, delivering real courses, in real institutions." - Donald Clark"

"The algorithmic manager seems to watch everything you do. Ride-hailing platforms track a variety of personalized statistics, including ride acceptance rates, cancellation rates, hours spent logged in to the app and trips completed. And they display selected statistics to individual drivers as motivating tools, like "You're in the top 10 percent of partners!" Uber uses the accelerometer in drivers' phones along with GPS and gyroscope to give them safe driving reports, tracking their performance in granular detail. One driver posted to a forum that a grade of 210 out of 247 "smooth accelerations" earned a "Great work!" from the boss."