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dr tech

Naomi Klein: How big tech plans to profit from the pandemic | News | The Guardian - 0 views

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    "This is a future in which, for the privileged, almost everything is home delivered, either virtually via streaming and cloud technology, or physically via driverless vehicle or drone, then screen "shared" on a mediated platform. "
dr tech

The Fresh Smell of ransomed coffee - Avast Threat Labs - 0 views

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    "Let's say you have an IoT device that is well protected with functions that can be accessed through a well-defined API; even if you can control the device through the API, you probably can't do too much harm. Firmware, the programming inside the device has logical constraints that don't allow you, for example, to close garage doors while someone is in the way of them or overheat a device so that it combusts.  We used to trust that hardware, such as a common kitchen appliance, could be trusted and could not be easily altered without physically dismounting the device. But with today's "smart" appliances, this is no longer the case."
dr tech

'Being young' leads to detention in China's Xinjiang region | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

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    "The IJOP is a massive database combining personal data scooped from automated online monitoring and information manually entered into a bespoke app by officials. It includes information ranging from people's physical characteristics to the colour of their car and their personal preference of using the front or back door to enter their house, as well as software they use online and their regular contacts."
jhendoooo

Biometric data collection for Digital ID of all Bhutanese to commence from January next... - 0 views

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    "Digital Identity (ID) is one of the main results focused under the main Digital Drukyul Flagship Program of Nu 2.557 bn as the fund also covers results such as Institutionalizing e-Patient Information System, creating Digital Schools, Integrating e-business services (business licensing and Single window for trade), Land records, tax information etc. Citing some examples of what benefits people can expect with the completion of the Digital ID Lobzang Jamtsho, Chief ICT Officer, Application Development Division, Department of Technology and Telecom (DITT) under Ministry of Information and Communication (MoIC) said stated, "Currently the online processes are hybrid in nature, where although we communicate or negotiate online, people still need to be physically present to sign a contract or make online transactions." He said that with the use of Digital ID, one can have bank transactions or even sign up contracts remotely to state a few components that the program encapsulates. The paper found that the biggest advantage of the Digital ID of the person is that all the information of the person will be stored and based around the Digital ID of the person. This could be health records, land records, tax records, revenue and bank records, business records, education records, census records etc. The person can use his digital ID to access all this information and also use his ID to complete online procedures to avail services. To protect the privacy of the person access to the information will be compartmentalized and restricted so some tax officials for example cannot access the health records of a person. A key component of digital ID is collecting the biometric details of people like eyes and all finger prints for verification and security."
dr tech

'Email is a zombie that keeps rising from the dead': the endless pursuit of Inbox Zero ... - 0 views

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    ""A full inbox is a constant reminder of what we have not done and can impact our sense of accomplishment," Lukins says. "Inbox Zero is a powerful strategy we can implement to increase our sense of control about our workflow. Each time we achieve a task, we receive a hit of dopamine that is physically reinforcing, and [we] feel the psychological relief of achievement.""
dr tech

Working from home could be damaging for mentally demanding tasks - 0 views

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    "The research concludes that mentally demanding tasks are more difficult to handle at home than when physically present at a workplace. Based on the chess players' performances, excessive use of homeworking can hurt productivity, the three researchers believe."
dr tech

'This is an epidemic': inside the Thai clinic taking on westerners' gaming addictions |... - 0 views

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    ""Just like any drug you can never get enough," says Olivia, a 50-year-old British author who describes the frightening experience of "living to play a game". In the depths of her addiction, her physical and mental health were at a low and she accumulated over £30,000 (US$37,500) of debt from in-game micro-purchases. In some cases, gamers can forget to eat or sleep, losing jobs and relationships in the process. In one incident in South Korea, a newborn starved to death while her parents gamed, and last year a 12-year-old Australian boy killed himself amid a gaming addiction."
dr tech

Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz - 0 views

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    "Further, human intelligence is the lever that we have used for millennia to create the world we live in today: science, technology, math, physics, chemistry, medicine, energy, construction, transportation, communication, art, music, culture, philosophy, ethics, morality. Without the application of intelligence on all these domains, we would all still be living in mud huts, scratching out a meager existence of subsistence farming. Instead we have used our intelligence to raise our standard of living on the order of 10,000X over the last 4,000 years. What AI offers us is the opportunity to profoundly augment human intelligence to make all of these outcomes of intelligence - and many others, from the creation of new medicines to ways to solve climate change to technologies to reach the stars - much, much better from here."
dr tech

China and physics may soon shatter our dreams of endless computing power | John Naughto... - 0 views

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    "But the uniqueness of TSMC and its location on an island that the Chinese regime regards as part of the mainland is giving rise to strategic panic. Both the US and the EU are racing to try to ensure that they have 2nm chip-fabrication capability within their respective jurisdictions. The problem is that one cannot conjure up such capacity just by throwing money at it. TSMC itself has built a fabrication plant in Arizona. But in his speech marking the ceremonial opening of the facility last December, Morris Chang, the firm's founder, said that it could not find enough qualified American workers to run it. It was sending every new American recruit to Taiwan for 18 months of training and was even importing engineers from Taiwan to make the Arizona plant operational. Hopefully it will all be up and running before Xi decides to "do a Putin" and we will no longer to be able to have chips with everything."
dr tech

This Voice Doesn't Exist - Generative Voice AI - 0 views

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    "Similarly to how voice cloning raises fears about the consequences of its potential misuse, increasingly many people worry that the proliferation of AI technology will put professionals' livelihoods at risk. At Eleven, we see a future in which voice actors are able to license their voices to train speech models for specific use, in exchange for fees. Clients and studios will still gladly feature professional voice talent in their projects and using AI will simply contribute to faster turnaround times and greater freedom to experiment and establish direction in early development. The technology will change how spoken audio is designed and recorded but the fact that voice actors no longer need to be physically present for every session really gives them the freedom to be involved in more projects at any one time, as well as to truly immortalize their voices."
dr tech

AI Makes Strides in Virtual Worlds More Like Our Own | Quanta Magazine - 0 views

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    "This is the broad goal of a new field known as embodied AI, and Li's not the only one embracing it. It overlaps with robotics, since robots can be the physical equivalent of embodied AI agents in the real world, and reinforcement learning - which has always trained an interactive agent to learn using long-term rewards as incentive. But Li and others think embodied AI could power a major shift from machines learning straightforward abilities, like recognizing images, to learning how to perform complex humanlike tasks with multiple steps, such as making an omelet."
dr tech

Technology festival's sock that detect Alzheimer's signs - BBC News - 0 views

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    "Let's start with the dementia socks. An intriguing idea, born out of a personal tragedy. Zeke Steer watched his own great-grandmother decline into dementia, and wanted to help. Spin forward a few years, and the research scientist has developed socks which detect early physical signs of the onset of diseases like Alzheimer's. "Sensors in our socks are detecting early signs of distress, and alerting a carer that they may need help," he says."
dr tech

How digital twins may enable personalised health treatment | Medical research | The Gua... - 0 views

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    "Imagine having a digital twin that gets ill, and can be experimented on to identify the best possible treatment, without you having to go near a pill or a surgeon's knife. Scientists believe that within five to 10 years, "in silico" trials - in which hundreds of virtual organs are used to assess the safety and efficacy of drugs - could become routine, while patient-specific organ models could be used to personalise treatment and avoid medical complications. Digital twins are computational models of physical objects or processes, updated using data from their real-world counterparts. Within medicine, this means combining vast amounts of data about the workings of genes, proteins, cells and whole-body systems with patients' personal data to create virtual models of their organs - and eventually, potentially their entire body"
dr tech

The Creepy New Digital Afterlife Industry - IEEE Spectrum - 0 views

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    "It's sometime in the near future. Your beloved father, who suffered from Alzheimer's for years, has died. Everyone in the family feels physically and emotionally exhausted from his long decline. Your brother raises the idea of remembering Dad at his best through a startup "digital immortality" program called 4evru. He promises to take care of the details and get the data for Dad ready. After the initial suggestion, you forget about it until today, when 4evru emails arrive to say that your father's bot is available for use. After some trepidation, you click the link and create an account. You slide on the somewhat unwieldy VR headset and choose the augmented-reality mode. The familiar walls of your bedroom briefly flicker in front of you."
dr tech

The advanced silicon chips on which the future depends are all made in Taiwan - here's ... - 0 views

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    "What's fascinating about all this is how much of it comes down, not to finance or technology, but to people and what they know. In that sense the FT's deep dive into TSMC's travails reminded me of a striking piece of research conducted decades ago by the philosopher of science Harry Collins when he was a PhD student. Collins was interested in how knowledge gets transferred and intrigued by a particular piece of technology, the TEA laser. This was a device that was comprehensively documented in the physics literature but which research laboratories were unable to replicate. What Collins discovered was that "nobody could make the laser work if they hadn't spent time in a laboratory that already had a working laser. There was very good information in the journals about how to build such a laser. But anybody who tried to put one together using written articles failed. They had something that looked like a laser on their bench, but it wouldn't lase.""
dr tech

Why Migrants Need Digital Sanctuary | Open Rights Group - 0 views

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    "When individuals migrate, their data migrates with them. When people leave their countries to travel and live in different places whether as migrants, refugees, or asylum seekers, they are not only seeking physical safety, they also need to be sure that their digital identity and information will be safe. However, if they are not careful or protected, their data could unwittingly leave a trail of their movements, potentially exposing them to various threats. Whether they are fleeing war, authoritarian regimes, or other adversaries, this data could inadvertently connect their identities to their pursuers."
dr tech

South Korea's AI textbook program faces skepticism from parents | TechCrunch - 0 views

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    "The tablets are scheduled to be introduced next year, and by 2028, teachers are supposed to be using these AI textbooks for all subjects except music, art, physical education and ethics. The government hasn't shared many details about how it will all work, except that the material is supposed to be customized for different speeds of learning, with teachers using dashboards to monitor how students are doing. In response, more than 50,000 parents have signed a petition demanding that the government focus less on new tech and more on students' overall well-being: "We, as parents, are already encountering many issues at unprecedented levels arising from [our children's] exposure to digital devices." Lee Sun-youn, a mother of two, told FT, "I am worried that too much usage of digital devices could negatively affect their brain development, concentration span and ability to solve problems - they already use smartphones and tablets too much.""
dr tech

Dario Amodei - Machines of Loving Grace - 0 views

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    "First of all, in the short term I agree with arguments that comparative advantage will continue to keep humans relevant and in fact increase their productivity, and may even in some ways level the playing field between humans. As long as AI is only better at 90% of a given job, the other 10% will cause humans to become highly leveraged, increasing compensation and in fact creating a bunch of new human jobs complementing and amplifying what AI is good at, such that the "10%" expands to continue to employ almost everyone. In fact, even if AI can do 100% of things better than humans, but it remains inefficient or expensive at some tasks, or if the resource inputs to humans and AI's are meaningfully different, then the logic of comparative advantage continues to apply. One area humans are likely to maintain a relative (or even absolute) advantage for a significant time is the physical world. Thus, I think that the human economy may continue to make sense even a little past the point where we reach "a country of geniuses in a datacenter"."
dr tech

'Godfather of AI' shortens odds of the technology wiping out humanity over next 30 year... - 0 views

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    The British-Canadian computer scientist often touted as a "godfather" of artificial intelligence has shortened the odds of AI wiping out humanity over the next three decades, warning the pace of change in the technology is "much faster" than expected. Prof Geoffrey Hinton, who this year was awarded the Nobel prize in physics for his work in AI, said there was a "10% to 20%" chance that AI would lead to human extinction within the next three decades. Previously Hinton had said there was a 10% chance of the technology triggering a catastrophic outcome for humanity.
dr tech

Are young people's attention spans really shrinking? It's more complex than you might t... - 0 views

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    Is it possible there are modes of attention that a younger generation is developing that might be difficult for those of us who are older to value, but which bring new types of benefit? What of the rapid, quick-fire, written exchanges of instant messaging? The art of the pithy, witty expression condensed into 140 or 280 characters? What of the dexterity and reflex-training physical and mental movement of the video game, or the socially dispersed forms of collective attention that are possible in online environments?
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