Group items tagged

A new blog shows the pages of a book that was bought in 1972, depicting the year 2010. Now that we are in that year, it is interesting to see what predictions were correct.

Facebook has rushed to fix a security flaw that allowed users to eavesdrop on the live chats of their friends and see their pending friend requests

Hmmm can anyone afford $4500 for seeing a TED lecture?

"Like China's Great Firewall, the UK firewall is a patchwork of rules and filters that are opaque to users and regulators. Every ISP uses its own censorship supplier to spy on its customers and decide what they're allowed to see, and they change what is and is not allowed from moment to moment, with no transparency into how, when or why those decisions are being made. "

"Luckily for the kid, it was only a single tweet. Had several students gotten together to form a study group, they might have been prosecuted for felony interference with a business model and gotten the death penalty. Do you suppose Pearson has hidden microphones set up around the schools so they can also listen in and see if students discuss the tests during lunch? I ask because that is basically the offline version of the student's infraction."

"But you might not end up reassured. Though it promises robot carers for an ageing population, it also forecasts huge numbers of jobs being wiped out: up to 35% of all workers in the UK and 47% of those in the US, including white-collar jobs, seeing their livelihoods taken away by machines."

""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"

"More specifically: delivery robots. What you see here is DRU (Domino's Robotic Unit), an autonomous delivery vehicle built in collaboration with Australian technology startup Marathon Targets that Domino's says is the first of its kind. It's filled with thousands of dollars worth of military robotics tech, but its covert mission has been to deliver fresh pizza to the residents of Queensland."

"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."

"I've got a theory of change I call the "peak indifference" theory. The early stage of a crisis involves trying to convince people that the crisis even exists, because things haven't gotten really terrible yet and it's not obvious that there's anything to really worry about, and the people who profit from the status quo will spend liberally to convince people that there's no reason to worry or change anything (see also: climate change, Facebook, cancer from smoking)."

"More and more independent thinkers are realizing that when being an employee is the equivalent to putting all your money into one stock - a better strategy is to diversify your portfolio. So you're seeing a lot more people looking to diversify their career." Faith Popcorn, a futurist, echoes the idea that we will all have to become as agile as possible and "have many forms of talent and work that you can provide the economy".

"A time is coming in which you may see more memorial accounts on Facebook than active users, with academics estimating that accounts belonging to the deceased will outnumber the living within 50 years."

"In the meantime, Pham is keen to see if robots can learn to build the chair using only an image of the assembled product as a guide. Will the technology ever help humans who struggle with the task? "I don't think it is in Ikea's business model to have robots assemble their chairs," he said. "In the next 10 to 20 years, people will still be sweating over flat-pack furniture.""

"Thanks to a map that shows the jogging habits of the 27 million people who use Fitbits and the like, we can see splotches of activity in otherwise dark areas, like Iraq and Syria. Some of those splotches are known American military sites full of exercising soldiers, and some, by extrapolation, are sites that the military would rather keep unknown. One journalist saw a lot of exercise activity on a Somalian beach that was suspected to be home to a CIA base. Someone else spotted a suspected missile site in Yemen, and a web of bases in Afghanistan were also revealed."

"A new proposal could see the country reduce the amount of tax benefits for companies that invest in automated machinery."

""I don't really care about data privacy because I think it's all an illusion anyway." It's interesting to see how this encounter also reflects the general behavior of a majority of people when it comes to privacy. Although user data has long been a gold mine for companies, would it be more acceptable if they started paying their users in exchange for it?"

"But maybe I'm wrong. Because, if we believe tech gurus at least, the Trolley Problem is about to become of huge real-world importance. Human beings might not find themselves in all that many Trolley Problem-style scenarios over the course of their lives, but soon we're going to start seeing self-driving cars on our streets, and they're going to have to make these judgments all the time."

"As hospitals face a surge in patients and critical equipment shortages stemming from the coronavirus pandemic, they are increasingly becoming the target of hackers who see health care facilities as easy prey. Ransomware attacks, in which hackers lock up a network and demand payment to return access to these systems, have presented a growing threat to hospitals since January. "

"This week, Atlassian's . This follows the trend of more and more high-profile hacks that are waking consumers up - like , , and the that rocked the country when 40 million debit and credit card numbers stolen during the holiday shopping time that year. (See of all the hacks from 2004 - present.)"

"My personal coding projects have presented similarly thorny ethical questions. Should I write a computer program that will download the communications of thousands of teenagers suffering from eating disorders posted on an anorexia advice website? Write a program to post anonymous, suicidal messages on hundreds of college forums to see which colleges offer the most support? My answer to these questions, incidentally, was "no". But I considered it. And the glory and peril of computers is that they magnify the impact of your whims: an impulse becomes a program that can hurt thousands of people."