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"The folks at Signal are taking one of the four post-quantum cryptography algorithms that have been chosen by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology to withstand attacks by quantum computers, but instead of using it to replace their existing public-key encryption system, they are layering the new algorithm on top of what they already have. "We are augmenting our existing cryptosystems," they say, "such that an attacker must break both systems in order to compute the keys protecting people's communications." And they will be rolling out this augmented system to all users in the next few months."

"That is why we must demand transparency here, especially in the case of technology that uses human-like interfaces such as language. For any automated system, we need to know what it was trained to do, what training data was used, who chose that data and for what purpose. In the words of AI researchers Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell, mimicking human behaviour is a "bright line" - a clear boundary not to be crossed - in computer software development. We treat interactions with things we perceive as human or human-like differently. With systems such as LaMDA we see their potential perils and the urgent need to design systems in ways that don't abuse our empathy or trust."

"Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks,[3] and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable. This confidence must be well justified and increase with the magnitude of a system's potential effects. OpenAI's recent statement regarding artificial general intelligence, states that "At some point, it may be important to get independent review before starting to train future systems, and for the most advanced efforts to agree to limit the rate of growth of compute used for creating new models." We agree. That point is now."

"Writing in the journal Science, Summerfield and colleagues from Google DeepMind report how they built the "Habermas Machine" - an AI system named after the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas. The system works by taking written views of individuals within a group and using them to generate a set of group statements designed to be acceptable to all. Group members can then rate these statements, a process that not only trains the system but allows the statement with the greatest endorsement to be selected."

Tenant-screening systems like SafeRent are often used in place of humans as a way to 'avoid engaging' directly with the applicants and pass the blame for a denial to a computer system, said Todd Kaplan, one of the attorneys representing Louis and the class of plaintiffs who sued the company. The property management company told Louis the software alone decided to reject her, but the SafeRent report indicated it was the management company that set the threshold for how high someone needed to score to have their application accepted. Louis and the other named plaintiff alleged SafeRent's algorithm disproportionately scored Black and Hispanic renters who use housing vouchers lower than white applicants. SafeRent has settled. In addition to making a $2.3m payment, the company has agreed to stop using a scoring system or make any kind of recommendation when it comes to prospective tenants who used housing vouchers for five years.

"Facewatch is being connected to realtime facial recognition systems that can be tied into the CCTVs of its 10,000+ participating retailers. If your face is on the blacklist and the system recognises you (or if your face isn't on the blacklist and you generate a false positive), the shopkeeper/security staff will get an alert when you enter their premises and they can make you leave. "

"The county is plotting the course to replace an enterprise resource planning system that has been in place since the 1980s."

"The robust way to do that, the way that can't be set aside at the whim of a government, is to require systems to be built so as not to collect data about a person. The basic principle is that a system must be designed not to collect certain data, if its basic function can be carried out without that data."

"According to Derek & Laura Cabrera, "wicked problems result from the mismatch between how real-world systems work and how we think they work". With systems thinking, there is constant testing and feedback between the real world, in all its complexity, and our mental model of it. This openness to test and look for feedback led Dr. Fisman to change his mind on the airborne spread of the coronavirus."

Motka Manjhi had been back and forth to the ration shop four or five times, his wife said, but on each occasion he returned empty-handed. His thumbprint, needed to prove his identity, wasn't registering on the new system."

"But BERT, which is now being deployed in services like Google's internet search engine, has a problem: It could be picking up on biases in the way a child mimics the bad behavior of his parents. BERT is one of a number of A.I. systems that learn from lots and lots of digitized information, as varied as old books, Wikipedia entries and news articles."

"The problem extends beyond the Pegasus project. Installed in Mexico City is one of the largest urban surveillance systems in the Americas: El Centro de Comando, Control, Cómputo, Comunicaciones y Contacto Ciudadano, better known as El C5. The network, connected to panic buttons and command centers, is spread over 1,485 kilometers with software designed to automatically detect license plates. On top of that, the number of installed cameras grew from 18 million to 65 million between 2018 and 2022, with stated plans to add at least an additional 16 million more. Despite its apparent pre-eminence, issues have arisen with the C5, from false identifications to mishandling of personal data. Technological malfunctions have also been shown to impact the outcomes of criminal cases because of the assumption of objectivity that video surveillance supposedly construes. The sprawling C5 system is dwarfed only by the Titan, an expansive intelligence and security database, both in terms of scale and threat to civil liberties. The software is used by several Mexican state governments to combine location data with other private information, including financial, government, and telecom data, to geolocate individuals across the country in real time. Governmental officials have been criticized for the controversial use of the database to target public figures, but, more problematically, access to Titan-enabled intel can be gained through an underground market, making it a further liability. The extent to which artificial intelligence has been incorporated into the C5 and Titan is still not clear, but the specter of surveillance remains large and is set to cause more worries with the addition of new smart technologies."

"But as a growing body of research shows, these electronic systems are not perfect. Our new study shows how often these technology-related errors occur and what they mean for patient safety. Often they occur due to programming errors or poor design and are less to do with the health workers using the system."

"First, the problems were manually translated into formal mathematical language for our systems to understand. In the official competition, students submit answers in two sessions of 4.5 hours each. Our systems solved one problem within minutes and took up to three days to solve the others. AlphaProof solved two algebra problems and one number theory problem by determining the answer and proving it was correct. This included the hardest problem in the competition, solved by only five contestants at this year's IMO. AlphaGeometry 2 proved the geometry problem, while the two combinatorics problems remained unsolved."

"The Ukrainian military has used AI-equipped drones mounted with explosives to fly into battlefields and strike at Russian oil refineries. American AI systems identified targets in Syria and Yemen for airstrikes earlier this year. The Israel Defense Forces, meanwhile, used another kind of AI-enabled targeting system to label as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants during the first weeks of its war in Gaza."

"Recent experiments suggest AI peer reviews tend to be surprisingly good, with 82.4% of scientists finding AI peer reviews more useful than at least some of the human reviews they received from on a paper, and other work suggests AI is reasonably good at spotting errors, though not as good as humans, yet. Regardless of how good AI gets, the scientific publishing system was not made to support AI writers writing to AI reviews for AI opinions for papers later summarized by AI. The system is going to break."

"A recent incident at a company has led to the dismissal of half its HR team after a manager discovered a significant flaw in the applicant tracking system (ATS) used for hiring. This system, intended to improve the recruitment process, was automatically rejecting all job candidates, including the manager's own application."

" 'Serious concerns' about DWP's use of AI to read correspondence from benefit claimants White mail system handles 'highly sensitive personal data' and people not told it is processing their information AI prototypes for UK welfare system dropped as officials lament 'false starts' Robert Booth UK technology editor Mon 27 Jan 2025 05.00 GMT Share When your mailbag brims with 25,000 letters and emails every day, deciding which to answer first is daunting. When lurking within are pleas for help from some of the country's most vulnerable people, the stakes only get higher. That is the challenge facing the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) as correspondence floods in from benefit applicants and claimants - of which there are more than 20 million, including pensioners, in the UK. The DWP thinks it may have found a solution in using artificial intelligence to read it all first - including handwritten missives. Human reading used to take weeks and could leave the most vulnerable people waiting for too long for help. But "white mail" is an AI that can do the same work in a day and supposedly prioritise the most vulnerable cases for officials to get to first."

"Most people agree that AI should transparently reveal itself not to be human, but many were happy for AI to talk in human-realistic ways. A majority (approximately 60%) felt that AI systems should refrain from expressing emotions, unless they were idiomatic expressions (like "I'm happy to help")."

"Despite these promises, concerns over privacy, security, and exclusion are growing. Critics, including Privacy International and Access Now, have raised alarm over the risks posed by poorly regulated digital ID systems. They caution, "Without strong safeguards, Africa's digital ID dream risks becoming a surveillance nightmare." Data breaches and inadequate legal frameworks further raise questions about whether these programs empower citizens or expose them to new vulnerabilities."