Digit_al Society

"So if we put those three findings together, what do we get? * Small groups of * ageing * right-wingers * on their desktop computers (because this study wasn't-couldn't be-carried out on mobile, only desktop) ..get their information from unreliable, partisan news sites. The study doesn't say whether they then go on to share it on Facebook or on their Twitter account grumpyboomer032945231, but it's not hard to imagine that's what happens. This isn't to let the search algorithms off the hook either, but does go to show that the real problem, as ever, lies with the humans."

"Second Life's endurance demonstrates that, whatever the configuration, a metaverse's success can only be founded on human qualities of social interaction and self-expression. "I obviously don't feel as excited now as when I started roaming around Second Life," Aufwie says. "But I still feel gratitude towards this apparently everlasting pioneering metaverse that allowed me to express myself, make friends, learn and share thoughts and all the good things humanity has within it.""

"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."

"An army of fake social media accounts on Twitter and the blogging site Medium have been promoting and defending the controversial hosting of a UN climate summit by the United Arab Emirates. The president of the Cop28 climate talks is Sultan Al Jaber, who is also the chief executive of the state oil giant Adnoc, which has major net zero-busting expansion plans."

"New research by scientists at Michigan State University suggests that laptops do not enhance classroom learning, and in fact students would be better off leaving their laptops in the dorm during class. Although computer use during class may create the illusion of enhanced engagement with course content, it more often reflects engagement with social media, YouTube videos, instant messaging, and other nonacademic content. This self-inflicted distraction comes at a cost, as students are spending up to one-third of valuable (and costly) class time zoned out, and the longer they are online the more their grades tend to suffer."

"Dr Kovanović believes this is a "pointless race to have", given the momentum of the technology and its potential positives. He says AI detection "misses the point". "I think it's much better to sink our effort into how we can use AI productively." He also argued the practice of using anti-plagiarism software to score university students on how likely it was their work was written by AI was causing unnecessary stress. "It's hard to trust that score," he said."

"Further, human intelligence is the lever that we have used for millennia to create the world we live in today: science, technology, math, physics, chemistry, medicine, energy, construction, transportation, communication, art, music, culture, philosophy, ethics, morality. Without the application of intelligence on all these domains, we would all still be living in mud huts, scratching out a meager existence of subsistence farming. Instead we have used our intelligence to raise our standard of living on the order of 10,000X over the last 4,000 years. What AI offers us is the opportunity to profoundly augment human intelligence to make all of these outcomes of intelligence - and many others, from the creation of new medicines to ways to solve climate change to technologies to reach the stars - much, much better from here."

"'Much easier to say no': Irish town unites in smartphone ban for young children Parents and schools across Greystones adopt voluntary 'no-smartphone code' in bid to curb peer pressure Rory Carroll Ireland correspondent @rorycarroll72 Sat 3 Jun 2023 09.00 BST Last modified on Sat 3 Jun 2023 09.02 BST On the principle of strength in numbers, parents in the Irish town of Greystones have banded together to collectively tell their children they cannot have a smartphone until secondary school. Parents' associations across the district's eight primary schools have adopted a no-smartphone code to present a united front against children's lobbying. "If everyone does it across the board you don't feel like you're the odd one out. It makes it so much easier to say no," said Laura Bourne, who has a child in junior infants. "The longer we can preserve their innocence the better.""

"Over the next few months, Lipkin's assignments dwindled. Managers began referring to her as "Olivia/ChatGPT" on Slack. In April, she was let go without explanation, but when she found managers writing about how using ChatGPT was cheaper than paying a writer, the reason for her layoff seemed clear. "Whenever people brought up ChatGPT, I felt insecure and anxious that it would replace me," she said. "Now I actually had proof that it was true, that those anxieties were warranted and now I was actually out of a job because of AI.""

"As we pass back through the factory, something catches my eye: a pallet of TV screens from a major manufacturer, still neatly boxed and plastic-wrapped. They are brand new, but here to be shredded: "They don't want this product resold and competing against their new products, so they want it all destroyed." I'd expected to see this at ERI, but not so brazenly. Manufacturers and retailers routinely destroy returns and unsold items, known as deadstock, en masse. As Kyle Wiens, founder of the repair chain iFixit, tells me, these "must-shred" contracts are the "dirty secret" of the recycling industry. ("The recyclers are desperate for manufacturer contracts, so they'll do anything and keep their mouths shut," Wiens says.) In 2021, for instance, an ITV News investigation in the UK found Amazon was sending millions of new and returned items a year to be destroyed. (Amazon says it has since stopped the practice.)"

"In a simulated test staged by the US military, an air force drone controlled by AI killed its operator to prevent it from interfering with its efforts to achieve its mission, an official said last month. AI used "highly unexpected strategies to achieve its goal" in the simulated test, said Col Tucker 'Cinco' Hamilton, the chief of AI test and operations with the US air force, during the Future Combat Air and Space Capabilities Summit in London in May. Hamilton described a simulated test in which a drone powered by artificial intelligence was advised to destroy enemy's air defense systems, and attacked anyone who interfered with that order."

"Schwartz told the court that he "greatly regrets" using ChatGPT to do his research for the case "and will never do so in the future without absolute verification of its authenticity." Judge Castel, however, doesn't seem swayed, and in his May 4 order he in no uncertain terms described the gravity of the situation. "The Court is presented with an unprecedented circumstance," reads the judge's order for a future hearing. "A submission filed by plaintiff's counsel in opposition to a motion to dismiss is replete with citations to non-existent cases... six of the submitted cases appear to be bogus judicial decisions with bogus quotes and bogus internal citations.""

"Employees use Hubstaff, one of the myriad monitoring tools that companies turned to as the Covid pandemic forced many to work remotely. Some, such as CleverControl and FlexiSPY offer webcam monitoring and audio recording. Mae says she often has dry eyes and a sore head at the end of the working day. "Tracking doesn't allow for thinking time or stepping away and coming back to work - it's very intense.""

"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."

"Team Trump shares video of Ron DeSantis deepfaked into the "Michael Scott wearing a women's suit" scene from The Office"

"Late last year, IBM took the record for the largest quantum computing system with a processor that contained 433 quantum bits, or qubits, the fundamental building blocks of quantum information processing. Now, the company has set its sights on a much bigger target: a 100,000-qubit machine that it aims to build within 10 years."

""Just like any drug you can never get enough," says Olivia, a 50-year-old British author who describes the frightening experience of "living to play a game". In the depths of her addiction, her physical and mental health were at a low and she accumulated over £30,000 (US$37,500) of debt from in-game micro-purchases. In some cases, gamers can forget to eat or sleep, losing jobs and relationships in the process. In one incident in South Korea, a newborn starved to death while her parents gamed, and last year a 12-year-old Australian boy killed himself amid a gaming addiction."

"They join attempts by lawmakers to regulate the internet for kids. States have proposed and even passed laws that restrict what children can access online, up to banning certain services entirely. On the federal level, several recently introduced bipartisan bills run the gamut from giving children more privacy protections to forbidding them from using social media at all. Some efforts also try to control the content that children can be exposed to. Critics of such legislation point to privacy issues with age verification mechanisms and fears that forced content moderation will inevitably lead to censorship, preventing kids from seeing material that's helpful along with what's considered harmful."

"At first glance, the change might seem relatively benign. Often, all folks surfing the web want is a quick-hit summary or snippet of something anyway. But it's not unfair to say that Google, which in April, according to data from SimilarWeb, hosted roughly 91 percent of all search traffic, is somewhat synonymous with, well, the internet. And the internet isn't just some ethereal, predetermined thing, as natural water or air. The internet is a marketplace, and Google is its kingmaker. As such, the demo raises an extremely important question for the future of the already-ravaged journalism industry: if Google's AI is going to mulch up original work and provide a distilled version of it to users at scale, without ever connecting them to the original work, how will publishers continue to monetize their work?"