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" Kurzweil believes that "medical robots will go inside our brain and connect our neo-cortex to the smart cloud," and that's all slated to happen by 2029."

"In 2015, a research group fed an AI system called Deep Patient health and medical data from some 700,000 people, and tested whether it could predict diseases. It could, but Deep Patient provides no explanation for the basis of a diagnosis, and the researchers have no idea how it comes to its conclusions. A doctor either can either trust or ignore the computer, but that trust will remain blind."

"But it is not just governments who will be interested in the results. The software is freely available and cheap. It is being distributed all over the internet of things, from intercoms to "home assistants". Once our faces are attached to the detailed digital identities that are already compiled by the advertising industry, any sufficiently sophisticated shopping mall will have a map of the preferences of everyone who enters its maw."

"In the beginning, we thought anonymity was part of the problem - that people being able to hide behind their screens without being identified were willing to say more extreme things than people who are named. But now you see people don't care about being named. They're willing to go to a public white supremacist rally unmasked with their full identity showing. They're proud of it. It doesn't make me believe more in humanity."

"Robots have been slow to appear because each one requires a rare confluence of market, task, technology, and innovation. (And luck. I only described some of the things that nearly killed Roomba.) But as technology advances and costs decline, the toolbox for robot designers constantly expands. Thus, more types of robots will cross the threshold of economic viability. Still, we can expect one constant. Each new, successful robot will represent a minimum-the simplest, lowest-cost solution to a problem people want solved. The growing set of tools that let us attack ever more interesting problems make this an exciting time to practice robotics."

"Eventually, we will reach a point of full saturation, a period in our evolution in which digital bits will outnumber atoms on Earth, a world "mostly computer simulated and dominated by digital bits and computer code," according to an article published in AIP Advances, by AIP Publishing."

"The development of a new code of conduct will take place in two phases. The first will include setting policies for in-person and virtual events as well as policies for technical spaces including chat rooms and other Wikimedia projects. It is set to be ratified by the board by 30 August."

"There are currently no usable photo data sets of mask-wearing people that can be used to train and evaluate facial recognition systems. The NIST study addressed this problem by superimposing masks (of various colours, sizes and positions) over images of faces, as seen here:"

""The AI will be trained to detect incidents such as people fighting, a group of agitated persons, people following someone else, and arguments or other abnormal behaviour," SMART lecturer and team lead Johan Barthelemy said. "It can also identify an unsafe environment, such as where there is a lack of lighting.The system will then alert a human operator who can quickly react if there is an issue.""

"Digital Identity (ID) is one of the main results focused under the main Digital Drukyul Flagship Program of Nu 2.557 bn as the fund also covers results such as Institutionalizing e-Patient Information System, creating Digital Schools, Integrating e-business services (business licensing and Single window for trade), Land records, tax information etc. Citing some examples of what benefits people can expect with the completion of the Digital ID Lobzang Jamtsho, Chief ICT Officer, Application Development Division, Department of Technology and Telecom (DITT) under Ministry of Information and Communication (MoIC) said stated, "Currently the online processes are hybrid in nature, where although we communicate or negotiate online, people still need to be physically present to sign a contract or make online transactions." He said that with the use of Digital ID, one can have bank transactions or even sign up contracts remotely to state a few components that the program encapsulates. The paper found that the biggest advantage of the Digital ID of the person is that all the information of the person will be stored and based around the Digital ID of the person. This could be health records, land records, tax records, revenue and bank records, business records, education records, census records etc. The person can use his digital ID to access all this information and also use his ID to complete online procedures to avail services. To protect the privacy of the person access to the information will be compartmentalized and restricted so some tax officials for example cannot access the health records of a person. A key component of digital ID is collecting the biometric details of people like eyes and all finger prints for verification and security."

"The problem with digital technology is that, for engineers, it is both intrinsically fascinating and seductively challenging, which means that they acquire a kind of tunnel vision: they are so focused on finding solutions to the technical problems that they are blinded to the wider context. At the moment, for example, the consensus-establishing processes for verifying blockchain transactions requires intensive computation, with a correspondingly heavy carbon footprint. Reducing that poses intriguing technical challenges, but focusing on them means that the engineering community isn't thinking about the governance issues raised by the technology. There may not be any central authority in a blockchain but, as Vili Lehdonvirta pointed out years ago, there are rules for what constitutes a consensus and, therefore, a question about who exactly sets those rules. The engineers? The owners of the biggest supercomputers on the chain? Goldman Sachs? These are ultimately political questions, not technical ones."

"The Home Office plans to use artificial intelligence to reduce the asylum backlog, and is launching a three-day hackathon in the search for quicker ways to process the 138,052 undecided asylum cases. The government is convening academics, tech experts, civil servants and business people to form 15 multidisciplinary teams tasked with brainstorming solutions to the backlog. Teams will be invited to compete to find the most innovative solutions, and will present their ideas to a panel of judges. The winners are expected to meet the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, in Downing Street for a prize-giving ceremony."

"But the uniqueness of TSMC and its location on an island that the Chinese regime regards as part of the mainland is giving rise to strategic panic. Both the US and the EU are racing to try to ensure that they have 2nm chip-fabrication capability within their respective jurisdictions. The problem is that one cannot conjure up such capacity just by throwing money at it. TSMC itself has built a fabrication plant in Arizona. But in his speech marking the ceremonial opening of the facility last December, Morris Chang, the firm's founder, said that it could not find enough qualified American workers to run it. It was sending every new American recruit to Taiwan for 18 months of training and was even importing engineers from Taiwan to make the Arizona plant operational. Hopefully it will all be up and running before Xi decides to "do a Putin" and we will no longer to be able to have chips with everything."

"Google has announced a new control in its robots.txt indexing file that would let publishers decide whether their content will "help improve Bard and Vertex AI generative APIs, including future generations of models that power those products." The control is a crawler called Google-Extended, and publishers can add it to the file in their site's documentation to tell Google not to use it for those two APIs. In its announcement, the company's vice president of "Trust" Danielle Romain said it's "heard from web publishers that they want greater choice and control over how their content is used for emerging generative AI use cases.""

"The role of AI writing systems as drafting buddies is a big departure from how writers typically get help, yet so far it is their biggest selling point and use case. Most writing tools available today will do some drafting for you, either by continuing where you left off or responding to a more specific instruction. SudoWrite, a popular AI writing tool for novelists, does all of these, with options to "write" where you left off, "describe" a highlighted noun, or "brainstorm" ideas based on a situation you describe. Systems like Jasper.ai or Lex will complete your paragraph or draft copy based on instructions, and Laika is similar but more focused on fiction and drama. "

"One of the many policy-based projects I worked on at Meta was Engagement Bait, which is defined as "a tactic that urges people to interact with Facebook posts through likes, shares, comments, and other actions in order to artificially boost engagement and get greater reach." Accordingly, "Posts and Pages that use this tactic will be demoted." To do this, "models are built off of certain guidelines" trained using "hundreds of thousands of posts" that "teams at Facebook have reviewed and categorized." The examples provided are obvious (eg. a post saying "comment "Yes" if you love rock as much as I do"), but the problem is that there will always be far subtler ways to get people to engage with something artificially. As an example, psychology researchers have a long history of studying negativity bias, which has been shown to operate across a wide array of domains, and to lead to increased online engagement. "

""Suffice to say, I do not feel the same enthusiasm around this technology," he wrote. "I understand that ChatGPT is in its infancy but perhaps that is the emerging horror of AI - that it will forever be in its infancy, as it will always have further to go, and the direction is always forward, always faster."

"There will be more where that came from. So it's time for a reality check. Quantum computers are interesting, but experience so far suggests they are exceedingly tricky to build and even harder to scale up. There are now about 50 working machines, most of them minuscule in terms of qubits. The biggest is one of IBM's, which has - wait for it - 433 qubits, which means scaling up to 20m qubits might, er, take a while. This will lead realists to conclude that RSA encryption is safe for the time being and critics to say that it's like nuclear fusion and artificial general intelligence - always 50 years in the future."

"Cave wrote in his response: "Since its launch in November last year many people, most buzzing with a kind of algorithmic awe, have sent me songs 'in the style of Nick Cave' created by ChatGPT. There have been dozens of them. Suffice to say, I do not feel the same enthusiasm around this technology. I understand that ChatGPT is in its infancy but perhaps that is the emerging horror of AI - that it will forever be in its infancy, as it will always have further to go, and the direction is always forward, always faster.""

"During the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of Americans will be forced to work, play, and learn from home for the foreseeable future. Such a massive shift will lean not only on shaky and expensive U.S. broadband networks, but popular teleconferencing programs that often don't quite work as advertised. Zoom in particular has seen a flood of new users, and the company's stock has jumped roughly 20 percent since the COVID-19 outbreak began. But as new users flock to the platform for work, they should be aware of a few things: namely, the company's data collection, its shaky privacy policy, and the fact your boss knows when you're not giving them your undivided attention."