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""Employers are increasingly exploiting metadata logged by software and devices for performance analytics and algorithmic control," Christl added. "MS is providing the tools for it. Practices we know from software development (and factories and call centres) are expanded to all white-collar work.""

"People have been censored or blocked from the platform because their names sounded too fake. Ads for clothing disabled people we removed buy algorithms that believed they were breaking the rules and promoting medical devices. The Vienna Tourist Board had to move to adult content friendly site OnlyFans to share works of art from their museum after Facebook removed photos of paintings. Words that have rude popular meanings but other more specific definitions in certain circles - like "hoe" amongst gardeners, or "cock" amongst chicken farmers or gun enthusiasts - can land people in the so-called "Facebook jail" for days or even weeks."

"The dark forest theory of the web points to the increasingly life-like but life-less state of being online. Most open and publicly available spaces on the web are overrun with bots, advertisers, trolls, data scrapers, clickbait, keyword-stuffing "content creators," and algorithmically manipulated junk. It's like a dark forest that seems eerily devoid of human life - all the living creatures are hidden beneath the ground or up in trees. If they reveal themselves, they risk being attacked by automated predators."

"Similarly to how voice cloning raises fears about the consequences of its potential misuse, increasingly many people worry that the proliferation of AI technology will put professionals' livelihoods at risk. At Eleven, we see a future in which voice actors are able to license their voices to train speech models for specific use, in exchange for fees. Clients and studios will still gladly feature professional voice talent in their projects and using AI will simply contribute to faster turnaround times and greater freedom to experiment and establish direction in early development. The technology will change how spoken audio is designed and recorded but the fact that voice actors no longer need to be physically present for every session really gives them the freedom to be involved in more projects at any one time, as well as to truly immortalize their voices."

"In combining these factors, we arrive at a civilization built upon a technological infrastructure that we fundamentally cannot understand. The same systems that promise us technological emancipation put the whole of society at risk. I vaguely recall a wise man once saying that only the fool builds his house upon sand. And so, how can a society maintain itself if the stones of its foundation are black boxes? Before we answer this question, let's examine the current state of affairs."

"It was robot accounts that caused "#TrumpWon" to trend after each TV debate and allowed Trump to claim "victory"."

"The paper, co-authored by researchers inside and outside Google, contended that technology companies could do more to ensure AI systems aimed at mimicking human writing and speech do not exacerbate historical gender biases and use of offensive language, according to a draft copy seen by Reuters."

"How do you maximize food production and prevent waste in your supply chain at a time when climate change and a growing global population are placing an increasing strain on resources?  According to Israeli startup Blue Circle, you do it in the same way you protect your technology from hackers: with artificial intelligence, machine learning and huge amounts of data. "

"Admiral Insurance will analyse the Facebook accounts of first-time car owners to look for personality traits that are linked to safe driving. For example, individuals who are identified as conscientious and well-organised will score well. Facebook forces Admiral to pull plan to price car insurance based on posts Read more The insurer will examine posts and likes by the Facebook user, although not photos, looking for habits that research shows are linked to these traits. These include writing in short concrete sentences, using lists, and arranging to meet friends at a set time and place, rather than just "tonight"."

"Google released a beta test version of its Chrome browser that attempts to keep your data secure even if today's uncrackable encryption becomes tomorrow's code-breaking cakewalk. The Chrome 54 beta gets the ability to encipher data sent to and from websites with a technology called CECPQ1. It "protects against future attacks using large quantum computers," Google said in a blog post Thursday."

"If Facebook cared about unfair profiling and privacy abuse, for instance, it would probably not have started grouping its users together based on their "Ethnic Affinity". It wouldn't then allow that ethnic affinity to be used as a basis for excluding users from advertisements, and it certainly wouldn't allows that ethnic affinity to be used as a basis for potentially illegal discrimination in real estate advertising."

"The school will teach cyber skills to some of the UK's most gifted 16- to 19-year-olds. It will select on talent alone, looking in particular for exceptional problem solvers and logic fiends, regardless of wealth or family background, according to Alastair MacWillson, a driving force behind the initiative. "The cyber threat is the real threat facing the UK, and the problem it's causing the UK government and companies is growing exponentially," said MacWillson, chair of Qufaro, a not-for-profit organisation created by a consortium of cybersecurity experts for the purposes of education."

"Automated decision-making is appealing to businesses as it can save time and eliminate human emotional volatility. "People have a bad day and it then colors their perception of the world and they make different decisions. In a hedge fund that's a big deal," he added."

"A simple Google image search highlighted on Twitter has been said to highlight the pervasiveness of racial bias and media profiling. "Three black teenagers" was a trending search on Google on Thursday after a US high school student pointed out the stark difference in results for "three black teenagers" and "three white teenagers"."

""No-limit Texas Hold'em is a game of incomplete information where the AI must infer a human player's intentions and then act in ways that incorporate both the direct odds of winning and bluffing behaviour to try to fool the other player." The designers said their computer didn't "bluff" the human players. But by learning from its mistakes and practising its moves at night between games, the AI was working out how to defeat its human opponents."

"There's a technology that could be really useful in providing a real-time measure of the effectiveness (or otherwise) of public policy. But it's so intrusive that in "normal" times we would be very hesitant to adopt it. Present times are not normal, though, so we will probably adopt it - perhaps sensibly - "just for the duration of the crisis". And then?"

"Where the researchers struck gold was by realising that a large (but not overly large pair of glasses) could act to "change the pixels" even in a real photo. By picking a pair of "geek" frames, with relatively large rims, the researchers were able to obscure about 6.5% of the pixels in any given facial picture. Printing a pattern over those frames then had the effect of manipulating the image."

"My entry point into this story began, as so many things do, with a late-night Google. Last December, I took an unsettling tumble into a wormhole of Google autocomplete suggestions that ended with "did the holocaust happen". And an entire page of results that claimed it didn't."

"Two decades on, the institute has decided to terminate the licensing programme for some MP3-related patents which effectively halts industry support. Although users can still listen to their MP3 files, inventors of new technologies will probably not include the file format in their blueprints as they turn to more advanced alternatives."