Ahhh ITGS group - a great discussion on the evoting problem would have been perfect for your Paper 2. "Remember: all of these principles of security, anonymity and verifiability have to be achieved in an understandable way. If they can't be then you get the opportunity for losers to claim fraud, and their supporters to believe them."
"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
"Wikipedia lives and dies by its references, the links to sources that back up information in the online encyclopaedia. But sometimes, those references are flawed - pointing to broken websites, erroneous information or non-reputable sources.
A study published on 19 October in Nature Machine Intelligence1 suggests that artificial intelligence (AI) can help to clean up inaccurate or incomplete reference lists in Wikipedia entries, improving their quality and reliability."
"A cryptocurrency is only as reliable as the technology that keeps it running, and Ethereum is learning this the hard way. An attacker has taken an estimated $60 million in Ethereum's digital money (Ether) by exploiting vulnerabilities in the Decentralized Autonomous Organization, an investment collective. The raider took advantage of a "recursive call" flaw in the DAO's code-based smart contracts, which administer the funds, to scoop up Ether many times in a single pass."
"The Home Team Science and Technology Agency (HTX) - which collaborated with ICA to roll out the scanning system - said in a statement that iris patterns have a higher degree of variation and uniqueness as compared to fingerprints, and are therefore "more robust and reliable.""
"Open AI researchers said that while it was "impossible to reliably detect all AI-written text", good classifiers could pick up signs that text was written by AI. The tool could be useful in cases where AI was used for "academic dishonesty" and when AI chatbots were positioned as humans, they said."
"Scientists must embrace circumspection, transparency, and robust ways of working that safeguard against bias and analytical flexibility. Doing so will provide parents and policymakers with the reliable insights they need on a topic most often characterized by unfounded media hype."
"The Open AI researchers were intrigued by a claim that self-driving cars would be intrinsically hard to fool (tricking them into sudden braking maneuvers, say), because "they capture images from multiple scales, angles, perspectives, and the like.""
"Instead, the new work shows our brains rely on the kind of maths that an algorithm might use to perform the task. In fact, Tsao and her colleague, Steven Le Chang, stumbled on their discovery while working on computer vision. The pair had initially set themselves the challenge of coming up with a way of reliably converting facial images into a numerical representation."
"Computers once performed facial recognition rather imprecisely, by identifying people's facial features and measuring the distances among them - a crude method that did not reliably result in matches. But recently, the technology has improved significantly, because of advances in artificial intelligence. A.I. software can analyze countless photos of people's faces and learn to make impressive predictions about which images are of the same person; the more faces it inspects, the better it gets. Clearview is deploying this approach using billions of photos from the public internet. By testing legal and ethical limits around the collection and use of those images, it has become the front-runner in the field. "
"The Italian supreme court ordered prosecutors last month to disclose how the Sky ECC data had been retrieved, arguing that it was impossible to have a fair trial if the accused is unable to access the evidence or assess its reliability and legality, a position supposed by the NGO Fair Trials. Whether prosecutors choose to do so could determine whether the arrests made this week lead to convictions or not.
Prosecutors in the UK face a similar dilemma in relation to the hacking of EncroChat, another secret messaging platform that had the added facility of a "panic" button that when pressed would immediately erase the phone's contents."
"This takes us to Kerala in south India, home to about 34 million people. There, the communist-led state government is launching something called the Kerala Fibre Optical Network (KFON) - and it's a major milestone. (It is worth noting the irony that the communist government, which has a history of opposing the introduction of computers, is now at the forefront of this digital initiative.) In 2016, the state recognised the internet as a basic citizen's right, joining other polities like Finland, Costa Rica and France. Next on the agenda: making this new right mean something.
Despite facing various setbacks - such as the pandemic and a corruption allegation that led to the arrest of the senior bureaucrat who was previously in charge of KFON (he denies the allegation) - the project has finally been launched. It's a fibre-optic broadband network project, aiming to provide affordable and reliable internet connectivity to every household, government institution and business entity in the state."
"It shows rapid technological advances are allowing governments and political actors to distort reality, and fake content is easier to publish than ever before.
"The difference is being blurred between true and false, real and artificial, facts and artifices, jeopardising the right to information," the report said. "The unprecedented ability to tamper with content is being used to undermine those who embody quality journalism and weaken journalism itself."
Artificial intelligence was "wreaking further havoc on the media world", the report said, with AI tools "digesting content and regurgitating it in the form of syntheses that flout the principles of rigour and reliability".
This is not just written AI content but visual, too. High-definition images that appear to show real people can be generated in seconds."
"What bothered Jeff, however, was not so much the loot boxes or the skins in themselves but another phenomenon that they have spawned: skins gambling.
This works like any other casino. You load up your account with funds, place a bet, watch the graphics spin and either win or lose.
The big difference in this case is that the casino taking your bet has no gambling licence and, in some cases, no reliable mechanism to stop under-18s getting their first taste of gambling - via an online ecosystem that is, to many parents, a total mystery."