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"Instead of putting bank tellers out of a job, ATMs increased the demand for tellers by reducing the cost of operating a bank branch. The reduced cost of operating a branch meant that banks opened more branches and hired more tellers to operate them. Bank branches in urban areas increased by more than 40% (source) The counterintuitive nature of new technologies is such that they may eliminate certain jobs - or parts of those jobs - but they also create new jobs and empower workers in existing jobs to be more productive."

"It's sometime in the near future. Your beloved father, who suffered from Alzheimer's for years, has died. Everyone in the family feels physically and emotionally exhausted from his long decline. Your brother raises the idea of remembering Dad at his best through a startup "digital immortality" program called 4evru. He promises to take care of the details and get the data for Dad ready. After the initial suggestion, you forget about it until today, when 4evru emails arrive to say that your father's bot is available for use. After some trepidation, you click the link and create an account. You slide on the somewhat unwieldy VR headset and choose the augmented-reality mode. The familiar walls of your bedroom briefly flicker in front of you."

"The camera never lies. Except, of course, it does - and seemingly more often with each passing day. In the age of the smartphone, digital edits on the fly to improve photos have become commonplace, from boosting colours to tweaking light levels. Now, a new breed of smartphone tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI) are adding to the debate about what it means to photograph reality. Google's latest smartphones released last week, the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, go a step further than devices from other companies. They are using AI to help alter people's expressions in photographs. It's an experience we've all had: one person in a group shot looks away from the camera or fails to smile. Google's phones can now look through your photos to mix and match from past expressions, using machine learning to put a smile from a different photo of them into the picture. Google calls it Best Take. "

"It shows rapid technological advances are allowing governments and political actors to distort reality, and fake content is easier to publish than ever before. "The difference is being blurred between true and false, real and artificial, facts and artifices, jeopardising the right to information," the report said. "The unprecedented ability to tamper with content is being used to undermine those who embody quality journalism and weaken journalism itself." Artificial intelligence was "wreaking further havoc on the media world", the report said, with AI tools "digesting content and regurgitating it in the form of syntheses that flout the principles of rigour and reliability". This is not just written AI content but visual, too. High-definition images that appear to show real people can be generated in seconds."

"His immediate concern is that the internet will be flooded with false photos, videos and text, and the average person will "not be able to know what is true anymore." He is also worried that AI technologies will in time upend the job market. Today, chatbots such as ChatGPT tend to complement human workers, but they could replace paralegals, personal assistants, translators and others who handle rote tasks. "It takes away the drudge work," he said. "It might take away more than that." Down the road, he is worried that future versions of the technology pose a threat to humanity because they often learn unexpected behavior from the vast amounts of data they analyze. This becomes an issue, he said, as individuals and companies allow AI systems not only to generate their own computer code but actually to run that code on their own. And he fears a day when truly autonomous weapons - those killer robots - become reality."

"Unrecord's appearance at the centre of gaming conversation raises another question: as game graphics improve, to the extent where you don't need millions of dollars and dozens of people to create games that look impressively realistic, how far do we go with it? Motorcycle racing game Ride 4 made waves recently with ultra-realistic gameplay footage of bikes zooming around rainy Northern Ireland; in that context, photorealism is a boon. But when games involve violence, as they often do, it becomes much more uncomfortable. I have suppressed mild disgust for years at the gratuitous neck-snapping or stabbing animations in most first-person shooters. How much worse would that instinctive ickiness be if the game and its characters looked more real?"

"Physicist creates AI algorithm that may prove reality is a simulation"

"A fake, AI-generated image of Pope Francis stepping out in a stylish white puffer jacket and bejewelled crucifix racked up millions of views over the weekend - with many mistaking it for a real image. Experts fear the rapidly developing technology behind the image could soon undermine our ability to distinguish fake photos, which can be generated in seconds, from reality."

"Tan, however, has misgivings. He says: "AI is in a sense cool and fun in the beginning but then you realise it's actually dangerous. It can imitate people and make them do things on screen and then you can have a whole societal belief that those people are disgraced for whatever they did on screen and in reality it wasn't even them. It's just a ploy to wind people up. "You see it in warfare, which I think Russia tried with Ukraine. There was this use that had the Ukrainian president saying they were giving up and soldiers should put their weapons down. That was done with AI. A simple tool which doesn't look dangerous suddenly can be very dangerous because now you are affecting reality with it.""

"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."

"The glasses pick up audio and visual cues, translating them into text that gets displayed on your lens, right in your line of vision. These virtual subtitles overlay on your vision of the world, providing a contextual, USEFUL augmented reality experience that's leaps and bounds ahead of what the Google Glass was designed to do in 2013."

"Cathy Hackl: I think it's important to state that there is really no agreed-upon definition right now. Every morning-it's become a bit of a ritual-I go to the Merriam-Webster dictionary and type in the word metaverse. And every day it says this word is not in the dictionary. But if we needed to define it, I tend to have a pretty expansive view of what the metaverse is. I believe it's a convergence of our physical and digital lives. It's our digital lifestyles, which we've been living on phones or computers, slowly catching up to our physical lives in some way, so that full convergence. It is enabled by many different technologies, like AR [augmented reality] and VR [virtual reality], which are the ones that most people tend to think about. But they're not the only entry points. There's also blockchain, which is a big component, there's 5G, there's edge computing, and many, many other technologies. To me, the metaverse is also about our identity and digital ownership. It's about a new extension of human creativity in some ways. But it's not going to be like one day we're going to wake up and exclaim, "The metaverse is here!" It's going to be an evolution."

"The Snapchat founder, Evan Spiegel, has dismissed Facebook's "metaverse" ambitions as "ambiguous and hypothetical" as he announced a raft of new augmented reality features coming to phones and Snap's experimental AR Spectacles over the next year."

"Cybersecurity researchers say the My2022 mobile app - the official app of the Beijing Winter Olympics - has serious security vulnerabilities and that "all Olympian audio is being collected, analyzed and saved on Chinese servers." Why This Matters: The Chinese government is mandating all Olympic athletes, coaches, and attendees use the My2022 app and, as of Thursday morning, the app is still available in the Apple and Android U.S. app stores where Americans can download it too."

""Social media surveillance technologies, such as the software acquired by Michigan State Police, are often introduced under the false premise that they are public safety and accountability tools. In reality, they endanger Black and marginalized communities,""

"Today we fear a different technological threat, one that centers not on machines but other humans. We see ourselves as imperiled by the terrifying social influence unleashed by the Internet in general and social media in particular. We hear warnings that nothing less than our collective ability to perceive reality is at stake, and that if we do not take corrective action we will lose our freedoms and way of life."

"They are subjects in an experiment that will show how the technology changes the way we form our identities, represent ourselves, and relate to others."

"Consider abstract art. We've noted that machine learning, in aiming to make an accurate prediction, constructs a high-dimensional feature space that contorts and reconfigures the data representing features of the natural world. Likewise, artists "mash and rip" features of visual reality to create a system of forms, texture, and color that richly represent features of visual experience in an alien way. The subject of representation is abstracted but represented none-the-less. "

"But those same services have also enabled the creation of what one professional factchecker calls a "perfect storm for misinformation". And with real-life interaction suppressed to counter the spread of the virus, it's easier than ever for people to fall deep down a rabbit hole of deception, where the endpoint may not simply be a decline in vaccination rates or the election of an unpleasant president, but the end of consensus reality as we know it. What happens when your basic understanding of the world is no longer the same as your neighbour's? And can Facebook stop that fate coming to us all?"

""In the event that [Facebook] were subject to a complete suspension of the transfer of users' data to the US," Yvonne Cunnane argued, "it is not clear … how, in those circumstances, it could continue to provide the Facebook and Instagram services in the EU." Facebook denied the filing was a threat, arguing in a statement that it was a simple reflection of reality. "Facebook is not threatening to withdraw from Europe," a spokesperson said."