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"From this fact about language development, Chomsky posited an (abstract) innate module for language learning - not processing. From a neurobiological standpoint, the brain has to be ready to understand language from birth. While there are plenty of examples of language specialization in infants, the precise neural mechanisms are still unknown, but not unknowable. But objects of study become unknowable when scientific terms are misused or misapplied. And this is precisely the danger: conflating AI with human understanding can lead to dangerous consequences."

" Virtual reality games helping UK's deaf children to understand speech Scientists have found that immersing kids in computer games can train their brains to localise sounds better Robin McKie Science Editor Sat 25 May 2024 13.00 BST Share Scientists have recruited an unusual ally in their efforts to help children overcome profound deafness. They are using computer games to boost the children's ability to localise sounds and understand speech. The project is known as Bears - for Both Ears - and it is aimed at youngsters who have been given twin cochlea implants because they were born with little or no hearing. "These are children who are profoundly deaf," said audio engineer Lorenzo Picinali, a scientist on the project from Imperial College London. "They require major interventions to restore their hearing and we have found that computer games can make these much more effective.""

"My job was to use technology to make the low-level content moderators' work more efficient. For example, we created a tool that allowed them to throw a video clip into our database and search for similar content. When I was at ByteDance, we received multiple requests from the bases to develop an algorithm that could automatically detect when a Douyin user spoke Uyghur, and then cut off the livestream session. The moderators had asked for this because they didn't understand the language. Streamers speaking ethnic languages and dialects that Mandarin-speakers don't understand would receive a warning to switch to Mandarin."

"PhotoGuard works by altering select pixels in an image such that they will disrupt an AI's ability to understand what the image is. Those "perturbations," as the research team refers to them, are invisible to the human eye but easily readable by machines. The "encoder" attack method of introducing these artifacts targets the algorithmic model's latent representation of the target image - the complex mathematics that describes the position and color of every pixel in an image - essentially preventing the AI from understanding what it is looking at."

"Ege Gürdeniz: There are two components to Artificial Intelligence (AI) bias. The first is an AI application making biased decisions regarding certain groups of people. This could be ethnicity, religion, gender, and so on. To understand that we first need to understand how AI works and how it's trained to complete specific tasks."

"A core selling point of machine learning is discovery without understanding, which is why errors are particularly common in machine-learning-based science. Three years ago, we compiled evidence revealing that an error called leakage - the machine learning version of teaching to the test - was pervasive, affecting hundreds of papers from 17 disciplines. Since then, we have been trying to understand the problem better and devise solutions.  This post presents an update. In short, we think things will get worse before they get better, although there are glimmers of hope on the horizon."

"In one activity, my students drafted a paragraph in class, fed their work to ChatGPT with a revision prompt, and then compared the output with their original writing. However, these types of comparative analyses failed because most of my students were not developed enough as writers to analyze the subtleties of meaning or evaluate style. "It makes my writing look fancy," one PhD student protested when I pointed to weaknesses in AI-revised text. My students also relied heavily on AI-powered paraphrasing tools such as Quillbot. Paraphrasing well, like drafting original research, is a process of deepening understanding. Recent high-profile examples of "duplicative language" are a reminder that paraphrasing is hard work. It is not surprising, then, that many students are tempted by AI-powered paraphrasing tools. These technologies, however, often result in inconsistent writing style, do not always help students avoid plagiarism, and allow the writer to gloss over understanding. Online paraphrasing tools are useful only when students have already developed a deep knowledge of the craft of writing."

"This cycle is particularly painful for non-engineers because they lack the mental models to understand what's actually going wrong. When an experienced developer encounters a bug, they can reason about potential causes and solutions based on years of pattern recognition. Without this background, you're essentially playing whack-a-mole with code you don't fully understand."

"Among six to seven year olds, who have grown up with YouTube, Spotify music streaming and the BBC iPlayer, the average DQ (digital quotient) score was 98, higher than for those aged between 45 and 49, who scored an average of 96. Digital understanding peaks between 14 and 15, with a DQ of 113 - and then drops gradually throughout adulthood, before falling rapidly in old age."

"Needless to say, AI-generated accidents and AI-generated artworks are viewed differently under the law. As far as art goes, be it a video, an image, a script, a song, or any medium that the AI can work with, the (US) law is pretty straightforward - According to copyright law, only humans can be granted copyrights. If it's created by AI, nobody can claim ownership of it or copyright it."

"Google is using romance novels to teach its artificial intelligence (AI) system to better understand how people communicate. Researchers at Google Brain, the company's AI-focused deep learning project, presented a paper earlier this month that detailed techniques they used to teach its AI to write fiction - and the results were unexpectedly haunting."

"AIs do not need more intelligence than humans to transform the job market. They need only enough to do the task well. And that is not far off, Harari says. "Children alive today will face the consequences. Most of what people learn in school or in college will probably be irrelevant by the time they are 40 or 50. If they want to continue to have a job, and to understand the world, and be relevant to what is happening, people will have to reinvent themselves again and again, and faster and faster.""

""Let's decide what it means to be a programmer,"Martin says in the video. "Civilization depends on us. Civilization doesn't understand this yet." His point is that in today's world, everything we do like buying things, making a phone call, driving cars, flying in planes, involves software. And dozens of people have already been killed by faulty software in cars, while hundreds of people have been killed from faulty software during air travel.  "We are killing people," Martin says. "We did not get into this business to kill people. And this is only getting worse.""

"Researchers have demonstrated how garbled speech commands hidden in radio or video broadcasts could be used to control a smartphone. The clips, which sound like the Daleks from Doctor Who, can be difficult for humans to understand but still trigger a phone's voice control functionality. The commands could make a smartphone share its location data, make calls and access compromised websites."

"But with the Snowden revelations and the widespread understanding of ubiquitous Internet surveillance (something that a minority was always aware of, of course), sociologists have observed a marked chilling effect on political and social discourse, as people who disagree with the majority fear that their searches and discussions will be observed, correlated, logged and use to ascribe guilt to them. "

"Security researcher Troy Hunt reports that the snuggly spies, from Spiral Toys, Security researcher Troy Hunt reports that the snuggly spies, from Spiral Toys, "represents the nexus" of the problem with internet-connected appliances and toys: children being recorded, data being leaked, and the technical possibility of surreptitious access to children through networked toys. "The best way to understand what these guys do is to simply watch the video [advertisement for the toy].""

"re than a thousand British schools are monitoring pupils' online communication for bullying and self-harm using software that analyses and translates slang for teachers. The software uses a constantly updated dictionary which includes words that most adults would not understand. These include acronyms such as "gnoc" (get naked on camera) and "dirl" (die in real life) and words such as Bio-Oil, a commercial product which can be used by children who self-harm to reduce the appearance of scarring."

"Now spool forward to the present. One of the things that baffles me is why more people are not alarmed by what Edward Snowden has been telling us about the scale and intrusiveness of internet surveillance. My hunch is that this is partly because - strangely - people can't relate the revelations to things they personally understand."

""A simple way of understanding what happened here is that you have a collision between a right to be forgotten and a right to know. From Google's perspective that's a balance," said Schmidt. "Google believes, having looked at the decision which is binding, that the balance that was struck was wrong.""