"Economists even have a term for it - the "lump of labor" fallacy. Innovation may destroy occupations but there is no fixed number of jobs and new ones take their place. Warehouse jobs, for example, replaced retail jobs as online shopping decimated shopping malls."

"Nearly 10 million Australians have had their private health data hacked - with sensitive medical records detailing treatments for alcoholism, drug addictions, and pregnancy terminations already posted online - in a cyber-attack believed to have been coordinated from Russia."

"KataGo's world-class AI learned Go by playing millions of games against itself. But that still isn't enough experience to cover every possible scenario, which leaves room for vulnerabilities from unexpected behavior. "KataGo generalizes well to many novel strategies, but it does get weaker the further away it gets from the games it saw during training," says Gleave. "Our adversary has discovered one such 'off-distribution' strategy that KataGo is particularly vulnerable to, but there are likely many others.""

"Owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, TikTok's success - more than 1 billion users worldwide - is combining with well-established fears about social media's data collection practices and concerns over China's geo-political ambitions to generate a background hum of distrust about the app. "As the geopolitical situation changes I suspect we will see companies such as TikTok will continue to be treated with some caution in the west," says Alan Woodward, a professor of cybersecurity at Surrey University."

"TikTok's algorithm is famously effective, yet hard to study. As part of the Guardian's special series on the platform's explosive rise, we tested how the algorithm treats different users. We wondered what would happen if three people - with varying ages, backgrounds, and familiarity with the platform - created new accounts and recorded what they saw."

"The post sparked a debate in the comments about the ethics of fine-tuning an AI on the work of a specific living artist, even as new fine-tuned models are posted daily. The most-upvoted comment asked, "Whether it's legal or not, how do you think this artist feels now that thousands of people can now copy her style of works almost exactly?""

"There's a similar problem in artificial intelligence: The people who develop AI are increasingly having problems explaining how it works and determining why it has the outputs it has. Deep neural networks (DNN)-made up of layers and layers of processing systems trained on human-created data to mimic the neural networks of our brains-often seem to mirror not just human intelligence but also human inexplicability."

"What if facial recognition technology isn't as good at recognising faces as it has sometimes been claimed to be? If the technology is being used in the criminal justice system, and gets the identification wrong, this can cause serious problems for people (see Robert Williams' story in "Facing up to the problems of recognising faces")."

"Among the most urgent questions facing Twitter in its new era as a private company under Elon Musk, a self-declared "free speech absolutist", is how the platform will handle moderation. After finalizing his takeover and ousting senior leadership, Musk declared on Friday that he would be forming a new "content moderation council" that would bring together "diverse views" on the issue."

"According to these internal documents, SIAM is a computer system that works behind the scenes of Iranian cellular networks, providing its operators a broad menu of remote commands to alter, disrupt, and monitor how customers use their phones. The tools can slow their data connections to a crawl, break the encryption of phone calls, track the movements of individuals or large groups, and produce detailed metadata summaries of who spoke to whom, when, and where. Such a system could help the government invisibly quash the ongoing protests - or those of tomorrow - an expert who reviewed the SIAM documents told The Intercept."

"With just about four months until the 2022 midterm elections, misinformation experts, civil rights advocates and researchers are worried that social media companies are unprepared to deal with a potential onslaught of falsehoods about the election. "

"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. "

""It's frankly shocking that these massive firms with the technological prowess they clearly have, are unable to weed out such blatant disinformation being pushed onto their users. In the case of Facebook, not once, not twice, but three times some of the same ads have been approved.""

"In the final sprint to the US midterm elections the social media giant TikTok risks being a major vector for election misinformation, experts warn, with the platform's huge user base and its design making it particularly susceptible to such threats."

"A new online study in Scientific Reports finds that drivers of these vehicles are assigned most of the blame for crashes which, the team argues, they can't reasonably avoid. This work is important because, as Niek Beckers at Delft University of Technology and colleagues point out, public opinion on this matter could shape future vehicle design and also legislation."

"Consumer faith in cybersecurity, data privacy, and responsible AI hinges on what companies do today-and establishing this digital trust just might lead to business growth. "

"A duo of researchers at the University of Waterloo and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have turned this old assumption of impracticality on its head with their description of a Wi-Fi localization exploit they call Wi-Peep. They have outlined how an inconspicuous and inexpensive device can locate hidden Wi-Fi devices without their cooperation."

"Artists say AI image generators are copying their style to make thousands of new images - and it's completely out of their control"

"Jean Twenge blamed the iPhone and social media for a host of social problems in the post-millennial cohort. But the technology thesis hasn't performed well under critical examination, as the Times package notes. "

"It would be a bit glib-and more than a little clichéd-to call this some kind of technological dystopia. Actually, dystopia wouldn't be right, exactly: Dystopian fiction is generally speculative, whereas all of these items and services are real. At the end of September, Amazon announced a suite of tech products in its move toward "ambient intelligence," which Amazon's hardware chief, Dave Limp, described as technology and devices that slip into the background but are "always there," collecting information and taking action against it. This intense devotion to tracking and quantifying all aspects of our waking and non-waking hours is nothing new-see the Apple Watch, the Fitbit, social media writ large, and the smartphone in your pocket-but Amazon has been unusually explicit about its plans. The Everything Store is becoming an Everything Tracker, collecting and leveraging large amounts of personal data related to entertainment, fitness, health, and, it claims, security. It's surveillance that millions of customers are opting in to."