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dr tech

Cory Doctorow: What Kind of Bubble is AI? - Locus Online - 0 views

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    "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.""
dr tech

Amazon pushes customers towards pricier products, report claims | Technology | The Guar... - 0 views

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    "Amazon's algorithms encourage customers pay more than they need to for popular products and appear to give more prominence to items that benefit the retail giant, according to an investigation by ProPublica. The investigation looked at 250 frequently purchased products over several weeks to see which ones were chosen to appear in the highly-prized "buy box" that pops up first as a suggested purchase. "
dr tech

When Intelligent Machines Cause Accidents, Who Is Legally Responsible? - 0 views

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    "Currently, the law treats machines as if they were all created equal, as simple consumer products. In most cases, when an accident occurs, standards of strict product liability law apply. In other words, unless a consumer uses a product in an outrageous way or grossly ignores safety warnings, the manufacturer is automatically considered at fault."
dr tech

Robots replace 90 per cent of humans in Chinese factory - productivity increases 162 pe... - 0 views

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    "Human beings have been replaced with robot arms, which have been busily crafting parts for mobile phones, with production per employee increased from 8,000 to 21,000 pieces at the same time. This amounts to a 162.5 per cent productivity improvement, and there is further bad news for the outdated meatsacks clutching their Chinese equivalent of P45s - the previous defect rate average of 25 per cent has now been reduced to just five per cent."
dr tech

AI will end the west's weak productivity and low growth. But who exactly will benefit? ... - 0 views

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    "What is in doubt is who will benefit from the boost to productivity. What if all the gains are seized by a handful of tech giants? What if history fails to repeat itself, and AI destroys more jobs than it creates? What if AI does lead to a net increase in employment, but the new jobs are less well-paid than the old ones? Put simply, what if it is different this time? That may well be the case. Much of the debate around the impact of AI is based on conjecture. There have been studies galore that have sought to estimate the number of jobs that will be affected - potentially running into the hundreds of millions globally - but nobody knows for sure. That said, certain conclusions can be drawn with a reasonable degree of confidence."
Max van Mesdag

Worst Products From CES 2010: The Craziest New Tech From The Consumer Electronics Show ... - 0 views

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    The Consumer Electronics Show revealed the worst technology-based products of the past year. At the top of the list? It's the electronic cigarette!
dr tech

8 Skilled Jobs That May Soon Be Replaced by Robots - 0 views

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    "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
dr tech

I Tried Predictim AI That Scans for 'Risky' Babysitters - 0 views

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    "The founders of Predictim want to be clear with me: Their product-an algorithm that scans the online footprint of a prospective babysitter to determine their "risk" levels for parents-is not racist. It is not biased. "We take ethics and bias extremely seriously," Sal Parsa, Predictim's CEO, tells me warily over the phone. "In fact, in the last 18 months we trained our product, our machine, our algorithm to make sure it was ethical and not biased. We took sensitive attributes, protected classes, sex, gender, race, away from our training set. We continuously audit our model. And on top of that we added a human review process.""
blackthunder175

Product Technology Partners for Bespoke Software and Hardware Solutions! - 1 views

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    "Cambridge, Cambridgeshire (fenews) August 18, 2016 - Known for Software development in Cambridge, Product Technology Partners has been catering the Software Development needs of its clients in a wide range of languages since 2000."
dr tech

Why is technology not making us more productive? - BBC News - 0 views

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    "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"
dr tech

'Tech platforms haven't been designed to think about death': meet the expert on what ha... - 0 views

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    "Something that a lot of mourners find disconcerting is when they receive automated prompts from social networking platforms telling them to friend somebody who has died, or connect with their dead spouse. Some platforms such as Twitter [now known as X] and TikTok lack a mechanism to treat a profile as being that of a dead person. Or, as in the case of LinkedIn, a mechanism exists but most people are not aware of it or don't use it. And while most platforms do offer an ability to download your archive, which you can then bequeath, it is far from straightforward. These products emanate from people who haven't had to think too much about the messiness of human existence Platforms can also delete dormant accounts, which can have repercussions. And there are also no guarantees how long any of the platforms we participate in will survive. That death hasn't been baked into tech platforms to begin with is a sign of a particular kind of privilege: these products emanate from people who haven't had to think too much about the messiness of human existence."
dr tech

Inside Ukraine's open-source war - News Azi - 0 views

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    ""Western partners trusted me to distribute stuff, give them actionable feedback and then adapt the product to Ukrainian conditions," he explains during a trip back to San Francisco to harness help from local software engineers. He still spends part of his time in the fragments of the Donbas region that remain under Ukrainian control, so that he can observe his "customers" - Ukrainian soldiers - in action, in order to develop products they can use. "I like to say this is the world's first open-source war," says Oleg Rogynskyy, 35, another Ukrainian who runs a Silicon Valley start-up. He is also helping the Ukrainian cause and exchanging ideas with other computing engineers on social media sites, message groups such as Signal, and GitHub, the platform where coders exchange ideas."
dr tech

'I spot brand new TVs, here to be shredded': the truth about our electronic waste | Was... - 0 views

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    "As we pass back through the factory, something catches my eye: a pallet of TV screens from a major manufacturer, still neatly boxed and plastic-wrapped. They are brand new, but here to be shredded: "They don't want this product resold and competing against their new products, so they want it all destroyed." I'd expected to see this at ERI, but not so brazenly. Manufacturers and retailers routinely destroy returns and unsold items, known as deadstock, en masse. As Kyle Wiens, founder of the repair chain iFixit, tells me, these "must-shred" contracts are the "dirty secret" of the recycling industry. ("The recyclers are desperate for manufacturer contracts, so they'll do anything and keep their mouths shut," Wiens says.) In 2021, for instance, an ITV News investigation in the UK found Amazon was sending millions of new and returned items a year to be destroyed. (Amazon says it has since stopped the practice.)"
dr tech

Working from home was fine for 6 months. Now it's not - 0 views

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    "Although a few companies (tech firms, largely) have decided that work from home is a long-term solution, others are realizing that simply won't work for them. JPMorgan says its internal data show workers are not as productive from home. The result is a decision to make the investments to bring people back as safely as possible in this new normal. "
dr tech

Big Tech Struggles to Turn AI Hype Into Profits - WSJ - 0 views

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    "Generative artificial-intelligence tools are unproven and expensive to operate, requiring muscular servers with expensive chips that consume lots of power. Microsoft MSFT -0.43%decrease; red down pointing triangle , Google, Adobe and other tech companies investing in AI are experimenting with an array of tactics to make, market and charge for it. Microsoft has lost money on one of its first generative AI products, said a person with knowledge of the figures. It and Google are now launching AI-backed upgrades to their software with higher price tags. Zoom Video Communications ZM 1.79%increase; green up pointing triangle has tried to mitigate costs by sometimes using a simpler AI it developed in-house. Adobe and others are putting caps on monthly usage and charging based on consumption. "A lot of the customers I've talked to are unhappy about the cost that they are seeing for running some of these models," said Adam Selipsky, the chief executive of Amazon.com's cloud division, Amazon Web Services, speaking of the industry broadly. "
dr tech

Facial-Recognition App Can Help Identify Missing Children - 0 views

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    "Advertising agency JWT China and missing children site Baby Back Home have jointly developed an app in China that utilizes facial-recognition technology to help identify missing or kidnapped kids, Creativity Online reported. The organizations say that, with a population reaching approximately 1.4 billion, everyone can be a search volunteer."
dr tech

Complex Algorithm Auto-Writes Books, Could Transform Science - 0 views

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    "computer programs can accelerate discovery in the sciences faster than scientists can, if the computer is trained to behave like one"
dr tech

'Boundless Informant' Is a Secret NSA Tool to Data-Mine the World - 0 views

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    "The NSA has a tool that records and analyzes all the flow of data that the spy agency collects around the world. Think of it as a global data-mining software that details exactly how much intelligence, and of what type, has been collected from every country in the world. It's aptly called "Boundless Informant." "
dr tech

Online scams 'target Apple customers for richer pickings' - BBC News - 0 views

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    "Cybercriminals are targeting people using Apple products as they are more likely to have disposable income, a security expert has warned. Blogger Graham Cluley said that while malware was more common on Windows, Apple customers could not "afford to be lackadaisical" about security. On Monday, he reported a text message scam that tried to trick people into handing over account information. Apple's support site warns customers not to enter details on spoof sites."
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