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"Algorithms and the data that drive them are designed and created by people, which means those systems can carry biases based on who builds them and how they're ultimately deployed. Safiya Umoja Noble, author of Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, offers a curated reading list exploring how technology can replicate and reinforce racist and sexist beliefs, how that bias can affect everything from health outcomes to financial credit to criminal justice, and why data discrimination is a major 21st century challenge."

"This type of approach can speed up learning times and improve the efficiency of algorithms, says Max Jaderberg at Google's AI company DeepMind. The company used a similar technique last year to teach an AI to explore a virtual maze. Its algorithm learned much more quickly than conventional reinforcement learning approaches. "Our agent is far quicker and requires a lot less experience from the world to train, making it much more data efficient," he says."

"Learning from rewards seems like the simplest thing. I make coffee, I sip coffee, I'm happy. My brain registers "brewing coffee" as an action that leads to a reward. That's the guiding insight behind deep reinforcement learning, a family of algorithms that famously smashed most of Atari's gaming catalog and triumphed over humans in strategy games like Go. Here, an AI "agent" explores the game, trying out different actions and registering ones that let it win."

"Nemitz identifies four bases of digital power which create and then reinforce its unhealthy concentration in too few hands: lots of money, which means influence; control of "infrastructures of public discourse"; collection of personal data and profiling of people; and domination of investment in AI, most of it a "black box" not open to public scrutiny. The key question is which of the challenges of AI "can be safely and with good conscience left to ethics" and which need law. Nemitz sees much that needs law."

"The system used historical data, including arrest records and electronic police reports, to forecast crime and help shape public safety strategies, according to company and city government materials. At no point did those materials suggest any effort to clean or amend the data to address the violations revealed by the DOJ. In all likelihood, the corrupted data was fed directly into the system, reinforcing the department's discriminatory practices."

"Already, artificially intelligent software can evolve false political and social constructs highly targeted to sway specific audiences. Users find themselves in highly individualized, algorithmically determined news and information feeds, intentionally designed to: isolate them from conflicting evidence or opinions, create self-reinforcing feedback loops of confirmation, and untether them from fact-based reality. And these are just early days. If memes and disinformation have been weaponized on social media, it is still in the musket stage."

""The disproportionally high arrest rates for members of the black community make the use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement problematic," the letter reads, "because it could serve to reinforce this trend."

"As colleges come under unprecedented pressure to downsize, from the pandemic as well as the steep enrollment decline that was already projected for 2025, some professors predict that the shift online might reinforce "corporate university" tendencies to track professors' productivity and use the results as an excuse to lay them off."

"In the future, the team predict the software could also learn the appropriate emotion to express at a given time. "It could be mostly empathic," said Huang, adding that a challenge would be to avoid the chatbot reinforcing negative feelings such as rage."

"Qoves founder Shafee Hassan claimed to MIT Technology Review that beauty scoring is widespread; social media platforms use it to identify attractive faces and give them more attention."

"It's hard to incentivise profit-driven companies to change their services according to specific needs while maintaining them free and accessible for all."

""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.""

"As the significant number of cybersecurity incidents and data breaches have shown, there is no question that we urgently need concerted action and clear policy at the government level. However, recognising that privacy and cybersecurity can be mutually reinforcing is key. "

"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."

"But it's not hard to see how social media and a rise in misogyny are, in fact, related. Social media sites trap girls in spirals questioning their attractiveness and self-worth. They're encouraged to compare themselves to others and seek approval for the way they look, while reinforcing beauty standards that favor thinness and whiteness. They feel pressured to promote themselves as objects. There have been many studies establishing all this over about the last 10 years, including Facebook's own research into girls and Instagram - research that the company suppressed until exposed by whistleblower Frances Haugen in 2021. "Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression," Facebook's study noted. "This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.""

"Japan, the world's fastest-aging economy, is turning to technologies like AI, avatars, and robots to address labor shortages. Industrial robots have been deployed to automate the assembly of reinforcement bars (rebar), one of the most labor-intensive processes in the construction industry. The trucking industry is turning to self-driving trucks for deliveries, and robots for moving cargo."

"Hassabis was a child chess prodigy, who learned the game aged four and was able to beat his dad three weeks later - indeed, when he started playing competitively he was so small he had to bring a pillow with him to reach the board - and became a strong player. Yet in AlphaZero's case there was no human input, other than telling it the rules of each game. "In a matter of a few hours it was superhuman," Hassabis says proudly."