"An artificial intelligence program has been developed that is better at spotting breast cancer in mammograms than expert radiologists. The AI outperformed the specialists by detecting cancers that the radiologists missed in the images, while ignoring features they falsely flagged as possible tumours."

"This is the so-called "privacy paradox", and the question is, what is needed to trigger an appropriate shift in regulation and public behaviour. What would it take for governments to take coherent, effective measures to stop the ruthless exploitation of personal data by surveillance capitalists?"

"Rather than being "taught" medical knowledge, the AI was asked to learn using unsupervised deep neural networks, known as autoencoders, without being given any medical knowledge. The researchers developed a method for translating the features found by the AI-only numbers initially-into high-resolution images that can be understood by humans."

"Activists from Fight for the Future prowled the halls of Congress in "jumpsuits with phone strapped to their heads conducting live facial recognition surveillance" to "show why this tech should be banned.""

"Yet so-called smart devices inarguably depend on thousands of low-paid humans who annotate sound snippets so tech companies can upgrade their electronic ears; our faintest whispers have become one of their most valuable datasets."

"Marx had a point. Especially when it comes to ethics, philosophy is often better at finding complications and problems than proposing changes. Silicon Valley has been better at changing the world (even if through breaking things) than taking pause to think through the conse­quences."

"For the first time, BBC News published a news story for every constituency that declared election results overnight - all written by a computer. It was the BBC's biggest test of machine-generated journalism so far. Each of nearly 700 articles - most in English but 40 of them in Welsh - was checked by a human editor before publication."

"The report cited a recent academic analysis of studies on how people interpret moods from facial expressions. That paper found that the previous scholarship showed such perceptions are unreliable for multiple reasons."

"On inbuilt bias in algorithms, Sharkey said: "There are so many biases happening now, from job interviews to welfare to determining who should get bail and who should go to jail. It is quite clear that we really have to stop using decision algorithms, and I am someone who has always been very light on regulation and always believed that it stifles innovation."

"Half a century ago, before the first Apple computer was even sold, climate scientists started making computer-generated forecasts of how Earth would warm as carbon emissions saturated the atmosphere (the atmosphere is now brimming with carbon). It turns out these decades-old climate models - which used math equations to predict how much greenhouse gases would heat the planet - were pretty darn accurate. Climate scientists gauged how well early models predicted Earth's relentless warming trend and published their research Wednesday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters."

"That tacit acceptance is actually buying into the tech-deterministic narrative, though. The question we should be asking - as the legal scholar Frank Pasquale says - is whether some of these technologies should be outlawed, or at least licensed for socially productive uses, like, say, radioactive isotopes are for medical purposes."

"Game players-like drivers-often have to reach conclusions without full understanding of what the other players-or drivers-are doing. So more researchers are applying game theory to train self-driving cars how to act in uncertain situations."

"acebook has come under fire this week after a hoax story about women being abducted in white vans went viral on its platform. The site's algorithms are thought to have perpetuated the circulation of the story."

""If everything that people are seeing is via social media - who is accountable? There is very little human intelligence or decision-making behind it, no attempt to give a balanced view. That seems to leave all responsibility on the reader.""

"In a recent test of Amazon's facial recognition software, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California revealed that it mistook 26 California lawmakers as people arrested for crimes. "

"The online newspaper Nu.nl had been Facebook's only factchecking partner in the Netherlands since Leiden University dropped out of the programme last year. The website had sole responsibility for marking Facebook and Instagram news content for Dutch users as being false or misleading, in order to help power the social network's tools that suppress distribution of misinformation."

"An American teenager who is using makeup tutorials on TikTok to spread awareness of China's detention of at least a million Muslims in internment camps in Xinjiang has claimed her videos are being censored by the platform."